Any expression of popular feeling seems liable to reproduce old traditional forms.
What sort of celebration lies at the back of the modernized Folkestone custom may be seen by the example of Lewes, where Bonfire Night is a perfect saturnalia which involves shuttering or boarding up windows and the importation of a hundred constables from Brighton. Several Bonfire Societies are formed in the town, which get up independent processions with bands, fancy dresses, tar-barrels, Bengal lights, and effigies filled with fireworks. Not content with Guy Fawkes, they also represent the Pope and any notorious criminals of the year. At five o'clock they meet in Commercial Square, where a mock Archbishop leads the "Bonfire Boys' Prayers," which consist of a doggerel condemnation of Romanism and the Gunpowder Plot. Then the grand procession forms up, marches to a special tune through the streets, and breaks up again into its component parts, each of which wends its way to its own gigantic bonfire, where its own effigies are burnt.. An interesting incident is that the Borough Boys throw a burning tar-barrel from the bridge into the river, which marks the boundary between the town and the Cliff, which is the local area of the Cliff Boys.
The ceremony has undergone ups and downs and modifications from time to time, of which Mr. Arthur Beckett, from whose Spirit of the Downs (cap. xviii.) I have taken these particulars, gives a full account. "The event," he says (p. 205), "is looked upon in the light of a local ritual," . . . and the professed horror of Romanism is only an "excuse for a license for men to lose their reason during a few short hours in the year" (p. 204). He attributes the prevalence of Bonfire festivities in the south-eastern counties to the example of Lewes.
He is probably unacquainted with the observances at
details of the observance of the festival in the seventeenth century will be found in The Treasury for December, 1912.
