For most people, Bonfire Night means Guy Fawkes, the Gunpowder Plot and 5 November 1605.
In Lewes, however, the night carries another historical memory.
Between 1555 and 1557, during the reign of Queen Mary I, seventeen Protestants were burned at the stake in Lewes for refusing to abandon their religious beliefs. Their deaths took place almost fifty years before the Gunpowder Plot, but their memory later became closely connected with the town's Bonfire celebrations.
Today, the seventeen martyrs are remembered in Lewes by the burning crosses carried through the streets on 5 November, by memorials around the town, and by a monument overlooking Lewes from Cliffe Hill.
To understand why they were killed, it is necessary to go back to the religious upheaval of sixteenth-century England.
England divided by religion
The English Reformation began under Henry VIII, but the religious character of the country continued to change considerably during the reigns of his children.
Under Henry's son, Edward VI, England moved much further towards Protestantism. Church services were conducted in English, Protestant forms of worship were introduced, and the Book of Common Prayer became central to religious life.
Edward died in 1553 at the age of fifteen.
After the brief attempt to place Lady Jane Grey on the throne, Henry VIII's eldest daughter, Mary, became Queen.
Mary was a committed Catholic.
She sought to reverse many of the religious changes made under Edward VI and restore England to communion with Rome. Catholic worship returned and laws against heresy, which had previously been repealed, were restored.
From 1555, people convicted of Protestant heresy could once again be burned at the stake.
The persecutions that followed became one of the most controversial episodes of Mary's reign. Around 280 Protestants were executed for heresy during the Marian persecutions, most of them by burning.
Lewes became one of the principal execution sites in Sussex.
Why were they executed?
The religious disputes of the period concerned questions that could literally become matters of life and death.
One of the most important was the Eucharist.
Catholic teaching held that during Mass the bread and wine became the body and blood of Christ, a doctrine known as transubstantiation.
Many Protestants rejected this.
Other disputes concerned the authority of the Pope, the use of Latin in worship, confession, the Mass and the relationship between scripture and Church teaching.
Those accused of heresy were questioned by church authorities and given opportunities to recant.
For some, doing so meant accepting beliefs they regarded as fundamentally false.
Those who refused could be condemned as heretics and handed over to the secular authorities for execution.
The surviving accounts of the Sussex martyrs show that several were examined repeatedly before sentence was finally passed.
Deryk Carver
The first of the seventeen martyrs commemorated at Lewes was Deryk Carver, also recorded as Dirick Carver.
Carver was a brewer from Brighton and was around forty years old when he was arrested.
He was accused of rejecting Catholic teaching, including transubstantiation and confession, and of regarding the Latin Mass as contrary to scripture.
Carver refused to change his beliefs.
He was burned at Lewes on 22 July 1555.
A plaque in Black Lion Street in Brighton commemorates him as the first Protestant martyr burned at Lewes.
His execution marked the beginning of a series of burnings in the town that continued for almost two years.
A detailed account of Carver and the other Sussex martyrs can be found in this history of the Lewes and Sussex Protestant Martyrs.
Four martyrs in 1556
On 6 June 1556, four more Protestants were burned together at Lewes.
They were:
- Thomas Harland of Woodmancote
- John Oswald of Woodmancote
- Thomas Avington of Ardingly
- Thomas Read of Ardingly
Harland was a carpenter and Oswald a husbandman.
One surviving account records Harland explaining that he had stopped attending church after the restoration of the Mass because the service was conducted in Latin, which he could not understand.
The four men were condemned for heresy and executed together at Lewes.
Their cases form part of a much wider pattern of prosecutions across Sussex during the period. More about their cases can be found in this history of the Sussex martyrs.
Two more followed
Around 20 June 1556, two further men were burned at Lewes.
They were:
- Thomas Hood, described as a minister of the Gospel
- Thomas Miles of Hellingly
By this point, Lewes had already become firmly associated with the Marian persecutions.
But the largest and best remembered execution was still to come.
The ten martyrs of 1557
On 22 June 1557, ten Protestants were burned together in Lewes.
They were:
- Richard Woodman of Warbleton
- George Stevens of Warbleton
- Alexander Hosman
- William Mainard of Mayfield
- Thomasina Wood of Mayfield
- Margery Morris of Heathfield
- James Morris of Heathfield
- Denis Burges of Buxted
- Ann Ashton of Rotherfield
- Mary Groves of Lewes
The mass execution became the defining event in the story of the Lewes martyrs.
Several of those condemned had already endured lengthy examinations and imprisonment.
Richard Woodman is particularly well documented. He was a Sussex ironmaster from Warbleton and was repeatedly questioned about his religious beliefs. Accounts of his examinations occupy a considerable amount of space in later Protestant histories of the persecutions.
He had already been arrested once and released before being taken again.
Eventually he was condemned.
Woodman and the other nine were brought to Lewes and burned together on 22 June 1557.
Their stories are covered in more detail in this account of the 1557 Lewes martyrs.
Where were they burned?
The executions took place in the centre of Lewes, close to the Star Inn.
The Star Inn stood on the site now occupied by Lewes Town Hall.
Tradition holds that ten of the martyrs were imprisoned in the medieval undercroft beneath the inn before being taken to their execution.
The undercroft still survives beneath the present building.
A plaque on the Town Hall records that ten of the seventeen martyrs were imprisoned in the vaults and were subsequently burned nearby between 1555 and 1557. The plaque was installed in 1949.
There is more about the Star Inn, its undercroft and the martyrs here.
This makes the history unusually tangible.
The site associated with the imprisonment of the martyrs is still part of the centre of modern Lewes.
The seventeen names
The seventeen people commemorated as the Lewes martyrs are:
- Deryk Carver
- Thomas Harland
- John Oswald
- Thomas Avington
- Thomas Read
- Thomas Hood
- Thomas Miles
- Richard Woodman
- George Stevens
- Alexander Hosman
- William Mainard
- Thomasina Wood
- Margery Morris
- James Morris
- Denis Burges
- Ann Ashton
- Mary Groves
They came from communities across Sussex, including Brighton, Woodmancote, Ardingly, Hellingly, Warbleton, Mayfield, Heathfield, Buxted and Rotherfield.
Only Mary Groves is listed as being from Lewes itself.
The phrase "Lewes Martyrs" therefore refers primarily to the place of execution rather than the home of the victims.
The Martyrs' Memorial
The most prominent physical memorial to the seventeen stands above the town at Cuilfail on Cliffe Hill.
The stone obelisk was erected in 1901 using money raised by public subscription.
Its inscription commemorates the seventeen Protestants who were burned during the reign of Queen Mary and records their names and dates of execution.
The memorial is now Grade II listed. Historic England's official listing for the Lewes Martyrs' Memorial gives further information about the monument and its history.
The memorial was not erected immediately after the executions.
It appeared more than three centuries later.
That gap is important, because the way Lewes remembers the martyrs today was shaped as much by nineteenth-century religious politics as by events in the sixteenth century.
Were the martyrs always part of Lewes Bonfire?
This is where the history becomes particularly interesting.
It would be easy to assume that Lewes people continuously commemorated the seventeen martyrs from the 1550s onwards.
The evidence suggests otherwise.
The martyrs appear to have largely disappeared from local popular memory before interest in them was revived during the nineteenth century.
Their commemoration became associated with Bonfire during a period when religious politics and anti-Catholic feeling were again prominent in Britain.
The Sussex Express also played a part in reviving interest in the martyrs.
In other words, the connection between the Marian persecutions and the modern Lewes Bonfire tradition appears to be largely Victorian rather than an uninterrupted tradition stretching directly back to 1557.
There is more discussion of this history in these Lewes Bonfire press and historical records.
That does not make the tradition any less historically significant.
It simply means there are two histories involved.
One is the story of the men and women burned in Lewes during Mary's reign.
The other is the story of how later generations in Lewes chose to remember them.
Why the nineteenth century?
Religion remained a major political issue in nineteenth-century Britain.
Catholic emancipation, the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England and debates about the relationship between Protestantism and Catholicism all generated strong reactions.
Lewes Bonfire developed during this atmosphere.
The organised Lewes Bonfire Societies began to emerge during the middle of the nineteenth century, at much the same time that interest in the martyrs was being revived.
The martyrs therefore became part of a broader Protestant identity attached to the Fifth of November.
Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot represented one episode in that history.
The Marian martyrs represented another.
Over time the two traditions became intertwined.
The seventeen burning crosses
One of the most recognisable features of Lewes Bonfire is the procession of burning crosses.
Seventeen crosses are carried through the streets, one for each of the seventeen martyrs.
Their appearance provides a direct connection between the modern procession and the executions of 1555 to 1557.
For spectators unfamiliar with the history, the crosses can appear simply to be part of the spectacle.
They are not.
They are memorial objects within the procession.
This distinction is important because much of the imagery associated with Lewes Bonfire has accumulated over centuries and does not all refer to the same historical event.
The crosses commemorate the Marian martyrs.
Other parts of the evening refer to the Gunpowder Plot.
Still others derive from later political, religious and Bonfire traditions.
Martyrdom and propaganda
There is another important part of the story.
Much of what later generations knew about the Marian martyrs came from John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, commonly known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs.
First published in the reign of Elizabeth I, Foxe's work told the stories of Protestants persecuted and executed under Mary.
It became extraordinarily influential in shaping English Protestant memory of Mary's reign.
That means surviving accounts of the martyrs need to be read carefully.
The executions themselves are historical events, but descriptions of the victims' words, actions and courage were preserved largely within a strongly Protestant tradition of martyr literature.
Later generations used these stories to construct a particular interpretation of English history, one in which Protestantism had survived persecution and Catholic rule was associated with tyranny.
That interpretation became deeply embedded in British popular culture.
Lewes Bonfire inherited part of that tradition.
"Bloody Mary"
Queen Mary I became known to later generations as "Bloody Mary", largely because of the Protestant executions carried out during her reign.
That nickname remains familiar today.
Modern historians tend to place the persecutions within the much wider context of sixteenth-century religious violence.
Protestants, Catholics and other religious dissenters faced imprisonment and execution at different points during the Tudor period, depending on who held power and which religious settlement was being enforced.
Recognising that wider context does not lessen the suffering of the Lewes martyrs.
It does, however, help avoid turning a complicated period of history into a simple story of one religion persecuting another.
The seventeen men and women commemorated in Lewes were executed because they would not conform to the religious settlement being imposed by Mary's government.
That remains the central historical fact.
Memory changes
The way a community remembers its past changes over time.
The Lewes martyrs provide an unusually clear example.
Their executions took place between 1555 and 1557.
Their stories were preserved in Protestant writings.
Their local memory appears to have faded.
Interest in them revived during the nineteenth century.
They became incorporated into the developing Lewes Bonfire tradition.
A monument was erected in 1901.
A plaque was added to the Town Hall in 1949.
And every 5 November, seventeen burning crosses still pass through the streets.
The tradition is therefore both Tudor and Victorian.
The martyrs belong to the sixteenth century.
Much of the way Lewes commemorates them belongs to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
More than a footnote to Guy Fawkes
This is why the Lewes martyrs deserve to be treated separately from the Gunpowder Plot.
They were not involved in the events of 1605.
They lived and died almost half a century earlier.
Their story belongs to the English Reformation, the reign of Mary I and the bitter religious divisions of Tudor England.
Only later did their memory become attached to the Fifth of November.
Understanding that distinction makes Lewes Bonfire easier to understand.
It is not simply a larger or more elaborate version of Guy Fawkes Night.
It is a collection of different historical traditions that have gradually become joined together.
The Gunpowder Plot is one of them.
The Bonfire Boys and nineteenth-century societies are another.
And carried through the streets each year in the form of seventeen burning crosses is the memory of seventeen people who died in Lewes more than 450 years ago.
Their names have survived.
So has the argument over what their deaths meant.
And, every Fifth of November, Lewes remembers them again.