Bonfire Night: York, the city Guy Fawkes called home

The conspirator was famously caught beneath the cellars of the Houses of Parliament among barrels of gunpowder on November 5, 1605. He was part of a Catholic plot to blow up Parliament with the intention of killing King James I and allowing a Catholic monarch to be reinstated on the throne.

Who was the real Guy Fawkes?

Fawkes's job was to mind the gunpowder stores and light the fuse before escaping across the Thames and seeking sanctuary in Catholic Europe.

Although there are gaps in the records of his life, Fawkes was from York, and retained strong links with his home city throughout his life.

He was born on Stonegate in 1570, to a father who was a proctor and ecclesiastical lawyer to the Archbishop of York. His parents were members of the Church of England, although his mother's family had Catholic heritage. The family were comfortably off and were descended from city merchants. Guy was baptised at St Michael le Belfrey Church, which still stands today next to York Minster.

His father died when he was eight, and his mother remarried a Catholic man from Harrogate called Denis Bainbridge. He attended St Peter's School, one of the country's oldest schools and one which still operates today. At the time, many of the teachers and governors had Catholic leanings, although the school was officially Protestant.

After leaving school, he sold some land at Clifton that he had inherited from his father and travelled abroad to fight for Catholic Spain in wars against the Dutch. On his return to England, he became involved with the Gunpowder Plot. Young's Hotel on Petergate in York was one of the inns allegedly used for gatherings of the plotters.

In 2015 the headmaster of Guy's alma mater St Peter's said it was time to 'move on' from traditions such as burning effigies of Fawkes to celebrate Bonfire Night.

In 2002, curators at the British Museum found a lost package of the plotters' gunpowder hidden inside a stationery box.

Guy met an unfortunate end, of course - he was found guilty of high treason and sentenced, along with his friends, to a gruesome death by being hung, drawn and quartered within sight of Westminster. Unlike the two comrades executed alongside him, he broke his neck during the hanging and was dead before the quartering began.

In 2017 the BBC screened a drama about the plot called Gunpowder, starring Game of Thrones actor Kit Harington. Filming took place in Yorkshire at locations including Oakwell Hall in Birstall, Kirkstall Abbey, Dalton Mills in Keighley and East Riddlesden Hall. The cast stayed in Saltaire and held the shoot's wrap party there.