Which Lewes society still marches under a 'No Popery' banner?

The Cliffe Bonfire Society still marches under a “No Popery” banner.

Cliffe is one of the historic bonfire societies of Lewes, a Sussex town known for exceptionally large and controversial 5 November celebrations. Its procession preserves several older anti-Catholic symbols associated with the event’s nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century traditions.

The banner refers to opposition to Roman Catholicism, an attitude rooted in the religious conflicts surrounding the Reformation, the Marian Persecutions and the Gunpowder Plot. In the 1950s, Cliffe was excluded from the United Grand Procession after refusing to remove its “No Popery” banner and banners commemorating Protestant martyrs.

That history can cause confusion because several Lewes societies take part in the same night of celebrations, but the banner is specifically associated with Cliffe. The society is also noted for continuing to burn an effigy of Pope Paul V, who was pope in 1605, although modern Lewes Bonfire is a complex mixture of historical remembrance, local identity, spectacle and controversy rather than a straightforward expression of seventeenth-century politics.