Guy Fawkes’ Day

An Act of 1606 made the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot a holiday, and by Chambers’s day it was one of the most joyous days of the year for English boys. A guy was dressed in cast-off clothes, with a dark lantern in one hand and matches in the other, paraded round the houses in a chair and burned on a bonfire at nightfall, while the boys begged pennies for the fire. In old London the bonfire in Lincoln’s Inn Fields was the greatest, and the butchers of Clare Market built another and paraded with marrow-bones and cleavers. Bonfires and fireworks on 5 November are still kept all over England.