Guy Fawkes night’s oddest traditions are due to a 1606 law (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Guy Fawkes night’s oddest traditions are due to a 1606 law (2014)

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Bonfire night in the UK is a very communal event with thousands of people gathering together in public parks to watch the spectacle of the bonfire and fireworks.

It feels quite harmonious, even though it is a celebration of murdeous treachery with loud explosions and hot burning fire.

Isn't it a celebration of the government foiling a religiously motivated terrorist plot, thanks to superior intelligence gathering and the torture of some of the conspirators, and subsequently used as an excuse to grant the government more powers to crack down on the religious group? That seems like the kind of thing the people could get behind today.

There’s also the fact that it was pretty much a setup, the group having been infiltrated some time before.

Since 2006 it has been illegal in the UK to "glorify an act of terrorism".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_Act_2006

However, as per the article, it's been law since 1606 to "glorify" this particular act; especially because it was foiled.

The terrorism act, of course, doesn't apply to any act of terrorism either sanctioned by or approved of by the government.

That law was repealed some time ago.

https://truthandshadows.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/guy-fawkes-...

A good read for paranoid types comparing the gunpowder 'plot' to September 11 2001 in the USA and resulting crackdowns...

'Fawkes was not apprehended in a basement room but rather a ground floor room, one remarkably easily rented by the plotters. There was, accordingly, no tunnel. The authorship of the letter by which the King learned of the plot is murky. It was turned over to the King by the Royal Chancellor, Sir Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury.

Sir Cecil I would characterize as the Dick Cheney of his day....' etc etc

The Cecils where the equivalent of the DCI or the heads of MI5 and MI6 - the BBC has a series on them currently airing

Thanks, I'll have to find that

watching first episode, are the commentators actors or people who have specialized in this? somewhat odd format...also dark/deep state parallels are interesting...

One great thing about it is that we don’t have people letting off fireworks all year round for no reason at all. Unlike some of our close neighbors.

It's illegal to set off fireworks after 11pm except on 4 dates, Bonfire Night being one of them (the others are Chinese New Year, New Year's Eve and Diwali).

Not to mention the anti - catholic bigotry that is still evident in some parts of the uk on bonfire night.

Really? Where do you see anti-catholic bigotry on Guy Fawkes night, the religious aspect of it is long forgotten and people dont really understand or care why it is a celebration, its just a bit of fun in the winter nights.

In Northern Ireland, they literally put posters of Catholic politicians on the bonfires.

That's the 12th July not November 5th and Northern Ireland is not representative of the rest of the UK in this instance.

I suspect parts of Northern Ireland and Glasgow

In Lewes for example (one of the biggest celebrations in the UK) they still burn an effigy of the pope every year. These days they burn Trump too, but the anti-Catholic traditions continue.

A particular quirk of British people is that we're very bad at stopping things that are considered traditions. We carry on with them long past the time they were relevant, maybe because none of us wants to be the one to question them. I doubt there's any anti-Catholic feeling in Lewes at all, but a lot of people who go along with burning an effigy of the pope because that's what they've always done.

As a more obvious example, Lewes bonfire society only agreed to stop blacking up for Nov. 5th this year. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/nov/05/lewes-b...

I didn't even know that there was an anti-Catholic element to it, until I went to Lewes one year. It was eye-opening.

For example, the Cliffe bonfire society refused to join the main parade because it meant giving up their "No Popery" traditions.

http://www.cliffebonfire.com/history.html

I have been to bonfire night in many places in the UK and never saw anything other than the guy being burned. Lewes is not representative of the UK as a whole.

Seconded. Lewes is a huge outlier.

> evident in some parts

When I was in the scouts (80s Britain), our local Catholic group organised a bonfire for November 5th, same as everybody else. We all knew about the origins of the tradition and the gunpowder plot, but I never caught any anti-catholic prejudice at all; unlike a few exceptions (Lewes, Northern Ireland), there didn't seem to be much heavy historical consciousness about protestantism and catholicism. And if anything, I'd say that's even more true today; guys on bonfires are rarer, some events go off without a bonfire at all (just having the fireworks as entertainment), and so on.

Hacker News readers may be amused to hear of this modern twist on proceedings - burning an effigy of the local broadband provider: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-41876557

Village my mother in law lived in until very recently still has no broadband. 768k would be a dream.

I've been to Bonfire Night parties all over England. In my experience, some people are vaguely aware of the anti-Catholic history, but it has nothing to do with that today. Guy Fawkes is now a kind of folk hero and Bonfire Night has morphed into a lighthearted celebration of him, if anything. It's really just an excuse to have fireworks, and big public nighttime gatherings.

This is largely true. For the most part, for most people, if they're aware of the story behind Guy Fawkes at all it's limited to him being "Some guy that tried to blow up the houses of parliament".

I mean, sure. He allegedly was involved in such a plot, but that's far from the whole story.

"allegedly involved"? He was caught bang to rights guarding the explosives under the House of Lords.

The recent BBC 3-part series about it is a good potted history http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05j1bc9 It also stars Jon Snow from Game of Thrones (Kit Harington). Spoiler: He dies again!

It was a stitch up man!

Naughty spoilers dude, that's not cool.

Pah! Some of us see Catesby's traitors as the villains they were and celebrate with a guy.

Remember, remember the fifth of November, gunpowder treason and plot...

I attended the Brockham bonfire last night (pictured in the article) and was really quite something.

Over the last couple of months there's been a lot of communal work to build the biggest bonfire I've ever seen - I believe it's the largest in the country. The fireworks themselves were absolutely brilliant but what was really lovely was that before hand they read out dedications to those who have passed. It felt a lot like being at a service really.

There's a great, recent episode of The Allusionist podcast that details how the word "guy" is an eponym of Guy Fawkes and provides interesting details of this bizarre law:

https://play.radiopublic.com/the-allusionist-m69DWK/ep/s1!2b...

In my Caribbean common wealth it is still celebrated in a small village. It has gotten massive compared to years of yore. I don't think many of the people even know why it is celebrated.

In British Columbia, the westernmost province of Canada, the bonfire night celebration has been grafted onto Halloween instead, and the evening of October 31st is filled with the same echoing of explosions and fireworks that you would experience in a city in England on Nov 5th.

I'm in Vancouver. I went onto the roof of my apartment building on Halloween and watched all the fireworks going off everywhere. It was awesome!

I never considered the similarities with Guy Fawkes day. Very interesting!

The bonfires are Irish and were always lit on Halloween (Samhain). Fireworks from our American cousins by way of our American Chinese cousins I'd guess...

Bonfire Night was traditionally held on Halloween, but delayed until November 5th while they caught the remaining plotters. It then continued on November 5th in subsequent years, so British Columbia is actually holding the celebrations on the traditional night.

Last week's episode of the BBC Radio 4 series "The Kitchen Cabinet" talked about food around Bonfire Night, with the food historian on the panel discussing how the food's always been melded a lot with the food of Halloween, but discussing how various food items (such as toffee apples) did become more prominent "once the persecution of Catholics became a less significant part of the celebrations".

Because really that's what it was all about to start with - persecuting, marginalising and generally being unpleasant to Catholics.

The Ottery St Mary tar barrelling is well worth watching. I'll never forget the sight of a bunch of people generally dressed in leather, beards and hair nearly ablaze but generally charred rolling the barrel. Sometimes you'd get a complete nutter fuelled on beer or cider and sheer adrenaline pick the thing up, put in on their shoulders and run down the street until they had quite severe burns or ran out of steam and thrown it on.

The neighbours are a bit odd (er than me) around here ...

'Sometimes' they pick it up? No, every single tar barrel is picked up and carried overhead while running through a crowd.

Pictures and footage from last night: http://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/tens-thousands-enjo...

As a Canadian and a fan of Alan Moore, I'm only dimly aware of Guy Fawkes night - I had no idea of the scale of it, nor its anti-Catholic history.

Honestly, with so much bad history between Catholics and Protestants in the British isles, this seems like the kind of thing that belongs on the dustbin of history.

My immediate thought on looking at the article and its opening picture was "Wow that so wouldn't fly in the USA these days."

I do find myself curious - did the Ku Klux Klan in the USA (first half of the 20th century) adopt burning crosses because of their anti-Catholic stance along with everything else they were against?

A lot of the initial KKK where Scottish protestant immigrants

The BBC has just done a remake of the Guy Fawkes story starring Kit Harrington which is pretty good: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05j1bc9

I don't think a drama about a historical event is called a "remake" :)

Re-interpretation? :-)

I'd go with dramatisation.

But it’s no “Gunpowder, Treason and Plot”. It’s hard to beat Jimmy McGovern.

They may no longer be anti-Catholic but are they carbon neutral?

The times they are a changing.

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