The butchers’ bonfire in Clare Market

On the fifth of November the butchers of Clare Market built their own bonfire in the open market by Bear Yard and thrashed each other round it with the sinews of slaughtered bulls. Parties of butchers from all the London markets paraded the streets ringing peals on marrow-bones and cleavers, loud enough to drown the church bells. Hone set this beside the great bonfire in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where old people remembered over two hundred cart-loads of fuel and more than thirty Guys burnt on gibbets in one night. By his day, he wrote, the zeal had faded and boys carried their Guy only for what it would earn.