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Except in Sussex! In the old medieval castle town of Lewes and local villages near Pevensey, where the Romans first landed nearly 2000 years ago, and the Normans followed suit a millennium later, Guy Fawkes is remembered in fire, explosion, parades and brass bands. The Cliffe and the South Street Bonfire Societies, long established in Lewes, vie with each other to produce the prize effigy for burning. And it is not just the infamous Guy Fawkes who is burnt to a cinder that night. In 1906, when women were fighting for equality, a "New Woman" or Suffragette was consigned to the flames. More recently, onlookers watched Bin Laden suffer immolation in the annual Lewes ritual of fire.
Elsewhere in Sussex, other Bonfire Societies illuminate the dark November night with their pyrotechnics. Hastings, Battle, Littlehampton, Rye, ("We Burn to do good"), Icklesham and Fletching all have their events though not all take place on Guy Fawkes Night. A Monarch before his Time. The King's far-sighted attempts to obtain Parliament's ratification of a truly politically united and economically integrated Britain under one crown failed, thanks to entrenched English mercantile interests and their self-centred political chauvinism. Although he described himself as King of Great Brittaine, (sic), to the anger of many contemporary English who wanted none of it, his dream of Anglo-Scottish integration under one crown was not to be fulfilled until his great-granddaughter Queen Anne, last of the Stuart sovereigns, ratified Parliament's Act of Union on 1 May, 1707. Even then the unification was something of a shotgun marriage accompanied by threats of dire consequences to the Scots if they did not appear at the altar. It was to survive less than 300 years before a divorce settlement returned home rule and a Parliament to the Scots in 1999. It was left to the Victorian imperialists to savour and promote the concept of a Great Britain.
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