Not surprisingly in this our 21st century, the internet has supplied many sources for this book. This is especially true in the case of the instantly famous and unendingly discussed story of the Gunpowder Plot. The information is general knowledge and easily discovered.
Most of my internet sources are readily and freely available to anyone, with a simple Google search. This is particularly true of primary sources, the numerous original documents from 1605 to the present, which are now available online without requiring travel to libraries or archives.
For example, the complete record of the trial of Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators, some 5500 words, will show up as your first choice if you google “guy fawkes trial transcript.” That’s all you need. It will get you to this page, though when you can google there’s no need to use the exact URL:
http://www.armitstead.com/gunpowder/gunpowder_trial.html
Likewise, the “House of Commons journal 1605” is accessible by using that title, which will lead directly to:
https://www.british-history.ac.uk/commons-jrnl/vol1/p256
Again, no need to bother with exact web addresses.
Still, there are also some very useful print sources.
The topics of religious strife in England begun by Henry VIII’s displacement of the pope as head of the English church; the Gunpowder Plot, and the life and death in particular of Guy Fawkes all drew the immediate attention of historians as well as preachers, politicians, and the general public of England. They have continued to keep that attention from the day when events took place right to the present.
There have been, as a result, many in-depth studies of the events of November 5, 1605, the context for them, and their aftermath. In the first few chapters my book presents some of the Catholic–Protestant religious conflicts that led to the extreme plot of Gunpowder Treason. Then comes Guy’s story, not presenting any new discoveries in such a thoroughly researched field but looking through the evidence to explain how his name was immediately on everyone’s tongue. Even today the original Guy remains among the best known figures in English history.
For a long time, as long as English Catholics battled English Protestants, the histories and biographies were partisan, taking one side or the other, often to extremes. In their eyes Guy Fawkes was a devil or a saint, depending on which side the partisan favored. But after several centuries, as the animosity between Catholics and protestants finally subsided, historians began to move toward a middle road, more judiciously and less stridently weighing the morality of the circumstances that led to the near destruction of the government in 1605.
To provide the religious context, I have relied particularly on A Brief History of the English Reformation by Derek Wilson, published in 2012 by Constable & Robinson. Only on a topic so extensively studied would “brief” be justified in the title of a 452-page book that includes a 17-page bibliography.
For Guy himself, my resource often has been Pity for the Guy by John Paul Davis, published in 2010 by Peter Owen. This one has a bibliography of a mere nine pages. The first word of the title is an indication of the book’s more balanced presentation, implying sympathy for Guy as well as for his intended victims.
Likewise very useful has been Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot by Antonia Fraser, published in 1996 by Doubleday in the United States. This one is 347 pages, including 11 pages of bibliography. “A full bibliography is impractical for reasons of space,” she notes. Her title likewise implies sympathy for both sides: Catholic faith, on the one hand, leading to what protestants saw as treason, on the other.
James Sharpe’s Remember, Remember: A Cultural History of Guy Fawkes Day (Harvard University Press, 2005) gives an excellent overview of developments in England with regard to Guy after 1605.
For details of Bonfire Day in the United States, Kevin Q. Doyle’s “Rage and Fury Which Only Hell Could Inspire: The Rhetoric and the Ritual of Gunpowder Treason in Early America,” his Ph.D. dissertation at Brandeis in 2013, is full of helpful specifics, with excellent early illustrations as a bonus. It too is available on the internet, by searching with the last five words of the title. It’s an open access document, available free.
My later chapters contain numerous examples of “guy” and “guys” in contexts showing the evolving development of the denotations and connotations of those words. Most of the examples come from another new kind of free internet source, the database that encompasses large amounts of print publications of the past and present.
Especially notable are the corpora available freely from Brigham Young University by googling “BYU corpora” or the simple URL corpus.byu.edu. At this writing there are more than 20 different BYU corpora. Of particular relevance for this book are the 400 million words in the Corpus of Historical American English, the 520 million words in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (1990–2015), and the 755 million words in Early English Books Online. There are also the 14 billion (yes, billion!) contemporary words in the iWeb Corpus of 95 carefully selected websites.
And corpora are available elsewhere on the web too: Google Books, Making of America books and journals, and many more, provide increasing opportunities to search for instances of particular words of any time period.
Personal pronouns (Chapter 8) and their history likewise have been extensively studied and explained in descriptions of English grammar, so I didn’t need to consult specialized studies to be able to offer the basic information this chapter provides. If you want more detail, googling something like “English second-person pronoun history” will lead quickly to further explanations, starting with Wikipedia.