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Doee the 'Guy Fawkes Tradition' Predate Guy Fawkes?

The East Sussex and Kent Bonfire traditions are a hangover from the lighting of beacons along the coast to warn of impending invasion or attack.

The original 'Bonfire Boys' were the lookouts who lit the beacons, and this has been conflated with the Fawkes tradition over the years. So that would put the origins at least as early as the Armada (1588), 17 years before the Gunpowder Plot.
 
A reminder of Guy Fawkes in Mythconceptions in FT 399: he didn't burn at the stake, he committed suicide to escape being hanged. Jumped off the platform and broke his neck.
 
[on topic] I'm Scottish and I've always been baffled as to why Guy Fawkes night is celebrated here given that the gunpowder plot took place more than 100 years before the Act of Union in 1707. Thinking about it in the context of this thread, however, perhaps it's more down to the adaption of traditional winter celebrations and folk memories than anything else.

I'm only three years late in replying, I hope you're not too upset!

I'd hazard the reason might be that James I of England & Wales being also King James VI of Scotland for much longer than he was monarch of England (Jamie Saxt) it's a celebration of him not getting blown into a zillion teeny-tiny pieces.

Edited to add: Jamie Saxt now has his own entry on Scots-language Wikipedia https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_VI,_King_o_Scots

(Coming from the far south west of England, almost as far it's possible to be from Scotland on mainlaind Britain I am happy to find out that I can understand it very well!)
 
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A reminder of Guy Fawkes in Mythconceptions in FT 399: he didn't burn at the stake, he committed suicide to escape being hanged. Jumped off the platform and broke his neck.
Our gruesomely-inclined junior class teacher (who enraptured us 9 year-old with tales of torture) reckoned Fawkes 'jumped into the noose', i.e. contrived to break his neck rather than be half-strangled, revived and further processed.
 
In the tradition of religious co-opting of holidays and other meaningful days, is there any older tradition that involves burning human effigies that Guy Fawkes Day might have taken over?

I'm thinking in terms of the book "Santa: Last of the Wildmen" which showed how Halloween, Christmas, and New Years used to be more of all the same holiday.
I often thought that.
 
It was probably a backwards salto into the noose, just to show off.
 
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