![]() ![]() The Wicker Man is one of my favourite films. I have always been a huge fan of gothic and folk horror. As they investigate the village’s history, they realise that the deaths of two young martyrs are somehow entwined with the disappearance of two teenage girls in the 1990s and the apparent suicide of the previous vicar. When Reverend Jack Brooks and daughter Flo arrive at Chapel Croft, they find themselves confronting ghosts of the villages dark and bloody past both literally and metaphorically. The ghosts of the two girls are also supposed to haunt the old chapel, appearing to those in trouble, forewarning of bad events to come. ![]() The Burning Girls are cast into the fire in their memory. ![]() In my new novel, The Burning Girls, the flaming torches of the Lewes procession have been replaced by ‘Blair Witch’ like twig dolls which the villagers of Chapel Croft make every year to commemorate the two youngest martyrs burnt at the stake. The sight of the huge processions, participants dressed in historical clothes, carrying flaming torches (even the children) is something to behold. The memory of the Lewes martyrs is celebrated with an annual torchlight procession and many bonfire societies in the area carry seventeen flaming torches every November 5th. Since the nineteenth century, the Lewes bonfire societies have annually remembered the martyrdom. It was only when Mary’s reign came to an end in 1558 that they were able to return to open worship. Such was the conviction of the Protestants’ faith, they would not recant their deeply held beliefs-that Jesus Christ was the head of the church, and it was inconceivable that the Roman Catholic Church should put the Pope at the head of the Christian faith. Ten Protestants: Richard Woodman, George Stevens, Alexander Hosman, William Mainard, Thomasina Wood, Margery Morris, James Morris, Denis Burges, Ann Ashdon and Mary Groves were all burned at the stake. So, he arranged the largest bonfire of humans the town, or indeed the country, had ever seen. ![]() On the 6th of June 1556 three more Protestants were taken to their flaming deaths in Lewes.ĭespite these deaths, Bonner, the Bishop of London was not convinced that the heretics were being persuaded back to the Roman faith. After forced confessions were signed, they were taken by their persecutors to Lewes town centre to be burned outside the Old Star Inn where the Town Hall now stands. Towards the end of 1554 four men were arrested by the High Sheriff of Sussex in Black Lion Street, Lewes for daring to read from the Bible. Among them were eminent Christians such as the Archbishop of Canterbury, several Bishops and dozens of clergymen and scholars. Hundreds of Protestants were arrested and forced to languish in appalling conditions in jail while waiting examination or execution. Mary’s persecution of the Protestants earned her the name of ‘Bloody Mary’. Seventeen of these martyrs were burned in the small Sussex town of Lewes, just a thirty-minute drive from where my family and I now live. Instead, to re-enforce them she had no fewer than 288 Protestants burned as ‘heretics. When Mary Tudor, daughter of Henry VIII came to the throne in England in 1553 she was pressured to abandon her unshakable Catholic views. ![]()
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