Horizon

Thoughts on Exploding Popes Part V

Part IV
Part III
Part II
Part I

(Hat tip to Joan's Place).

An even more important villain in the history of Bonfire has been the town authority itself, its crime to try to inhibit the carrying-out of the festival in the name of public order or safety. It is small wonder that the leading men of Lewes originally took a dim view of the town masses congregating to drink and start large fires, no matter how ostensibly noble the cause - particularly in an era without an organized police force or fire brigade. Their conventional response up to 1848 was to suppress, in some cases by the use of the Riot Act and the threat of call-out of the local militia. In the year of the great European revolutions, and perhaps not without some faint connection, the authorities changed tack and instead tried to tame Bonfire by co-opting it and making it a quasi-official service of the town’s local government. This stealthy embourgeouisement calmed down the more riotous elements in the annual festivities and encouraged the involvement of more respectable elements in the community, a process of reconciliation that continues to the present day so that official Lewes now embraces Bonfire with only slightly exposed misgivings. But local notables continue to dominate the ranks of the Enemies of Bonfire, and Paul V has had to share burning space with unsympathetic councilors, the editor of the town’s newspaper who printed a critical article, and a model of the civic bank that had the audacity to impose charges on one of the Society’s accounts. For all the talk of Popes and plots that surrounds Lewes, the truth is that the real emotional intensity of the event is parochial; the celebration of kings, martyrs and national deliverance is really a codified form of polite rebellion against the very neighborhood officials who represent the establishment that Bonfire reveres.

Will Bonfire survive? It faces obstacles both practical and cultural. The act of bonfire building is labor-intensive, requiring the active involvement of a large community in a somewhat thankless cyclical task that does not lend itself well to the skills or attitudes of incoming London white-collar commuters. Smaller bonfire organizations in Sussex and Kent have folded because of diminishing interest from new local residents; as a member of the threatened Ewhurst and Staplecross society says, “we do it to keep a body of people together, to keep the village alive”. Lewes faces no immediate decline in membership, but the spiraling costs of producing each event certainly present a growing challenge, as do the ever-more intrusive concerns of the police, medical, and fire safety authorities. Then there is the transfer of youthful allegiance from November 5 to October 31, a holiday given the crucial atmospheric support of the American movie industry (which understandably shows no interest whatsoever in the doings of Mr. Fawkes). As children have ceased to trundle hand-made effigies around their neighborhoods begging for “a Penny for the Guy”, so they have taken up the far more immediately gratifying practice of Trick-or-Treat. The disappearance of the last residual folk memories of the Protestant commemorative movement may see the Westminster plotters triumph yet. Or else, as one commentator suggests, the two celebrations will merge into one, each loosened from its discrete historical moorings but preserved by the ancient yearning to explode the night sky:

The British have invented an entirely new folk festival: a week of satisfying bangs and flashes which have lost all their historic purposes – except to defy the oncoming winter. They are neither purely Guy Fawkes’ night, nor Halloween ... instead there is something we might as well call fireworks week: a spontaneous outburst of religious enthusiasm, without any dogma at all.

“Without Dogma”? The overcooked Vicar of Christ might take issue with that. But then his November ordeal in Lewes has arguably always been subordinate to more prosaic concerns, a mere case of being the wrong Pope in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Posted by Alan Allport at November 7, 2005 01:30 PM