Old Guido resided just round the corner from where I type for a while - Ordsall Hall, Salford. One of the many national treasures that are under threat due to lack of funding and crap management unfortunately:-(

The thing about having your bonfire on a Saturday was not so much to do with decadence (does that mean having 10 teeth btw?) but to do with the Sunday issue mentioned. Sundays had allsorts of local by-laws attached to them. One of them, around these parts anyway, being you were not allowed to have bonfires (including the non-Guy Fawkes ones for buring garden rubbish) on a Sunday.

Richard 'Hamster' Hammond during his sojurn in Science Abuse did a realy good piece on whether the plot would have worked had it not been discovered - and boy did it! In a most spectacular style. Mind you I think the stocks of both gunpowder and concrete in the UK and most of Europe have never fully recovered from his experiment:-)

Cheers

DtG