Bonfires & bells : national memory and the Protestant calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England

Bonfires, synonymous with the Gunpowder Plot, and bells, rung on a host of joyous occasions, were the most public markers of a new calendar that was uniquely English and that developed in the two centuries following the reformation.

Overturning accepted ideas about English protestant attitudes to feast and celebration, David Cressy presents us with a picture of a people who were not all Puritan killjoys, bent on taking away the people's 'cakes and ale'.

His classic exploration of this little-known aspect of emerging English national identity shows how the traditional religious, farming and ritual calendars, with their distinctive feastdays, were joined by celebrations to mark monarchs' birthdays and coronations and other occasions which singled England out as a Protestant nation chosen by God for special protection.

Whether the jubilation was expressed in a continual 72-hour bonfire in Melton Mowbray to mark the restoration of King Charles II or the burning of the Whore of Babylon in Poultry, London in 1673 to commemorate the earlier protestant martyrs, they all expressed a sense that England had been preserved from danger and that public celebration was in order.