VB Oxford PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS BY HORACE HART, M.A. PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY HARVARD 734593 PRINTED IN ENGLAND, THE birthplace of John Bunyan was Elstow, a small village rather more than a mile to the south of the town of Bedford. The original form of the name of Elstow was Ellen-stow, the stow1 or place of St. Helen, one of our few early British saints, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, under whose patronage the village was originally placed. Elstow was the seat of a Benedictine nunnery, founded in 1078 by Judith, niece to William the Conqueror, and widow of Waltheof, Earl of Huntingdon ; and Elstow nunnery, or abbey, continued to rank among the most wealthy of similar foundations till the Dissolution. The abbey was surrendered to the crown Aug. 26, 1540. The sisters had pensions granted to them out of the estates, and several of them continued to live quietly close to their old home in the town of Bedford. The register of the united parishes of St. Mary and St. Peter Dunstaple in that town contains the entry of the burial of four of them. The monastic property passed to Sir Humphrey Ratcliffe, brother to the Earl of Sussex, who made the convent his place of residence. He died there in 1566, and was buried in the chancel. From the Ratcliffes the property passed to the Hillersdens, by whom a mansion was erected early in the seventeenth century, which 1 The Anglo-Saxon stow, a dwelling-place or habitation, forms an element in many local names. must have been a grand new house in Bunyan's early days. The ivy-clad ruins form a picturesque feature on the south side of the church. Attached to the south-west corner is a beautiful little apartment of the fourteenth century, vaulted from a central pillar, which may have been the chapter-house. The church, so intimately connected with Bunyan's history, which is only the nave of the abbey church, is a building of unusual loftiness and dignity, partly rude Norman, partly Early English, with five wellproportioned arches, and an Early English clerestory. The octagonal font, in which we may conclude that John Bunyan was himself baptized, as we learn from the parish registers his two daughters, Mary (his beloved blind child) (July 20, 1650) and Elizabeth (April 14, 1654) certainly were, stands at the west door, but originally stood in the north aisle, facing the entrance door. The seat assigned by long-standing tradition to John Bunyan is an old open oaken bench in the north aisle, facing the pulpit, and polished by the hands of the thousands of visitors yearly attracted to this little village by the fame of the tinker of Elstow. As the seat now faces south instead of east, it must have been moved from its original position. The pulpit, of a pentagonal form, must be looked on with no common interest, as that from which the sermon was preached by Christopher Hall, the then 'parson' of Elstow, which first awoke Bunyan's slumbering conscience. The tower, or 'steeple-house,' the scene of Bunyan's bell-ringing exploits, as well as of the fierce struggles of conscience so graphically described (Grace Abounding, §§ 33, 34), is a massive detached structure strongly buttressed, standing twenty-one feet from the church at its north-west corner. It is of late Perpendicular work, built after the destruction of the central tower and choir of the monastic church. The five bells that hang in it are the same in which Bunyan so much delighted. Tradition says that the fourth bell is the one he was accustomed to ring. The rough flagged floor, all worn and broken with the hobnailed boots of generations of ringers, happily remains undisturbed. The 'steeple-door' is in all respects the same as when he used to stand in it, hoping 'if a bell should fall' he could 'slip out' safely behind the thick walls,' which show as little tendency to ruin as in Bunyan's days. The church stands on the south side of the village green, a wide expanse of turf, very little altered either in its character or surroundings from the time when John Bunyan was the ringleader of all the youth of the place in the dances on the sward, 'tipcat,' and the other sports which his morbid conscience afterwards regarded as 'ungodly practices.' Few villages are so little modernized as Elstow. The old half-timbered cottages with overhanging storeys, gabled porches and peaked dormers, tapestried with roses and honeysuckles, must be much the same as in the days of the Commonwealth. On the green may still be seen the stump of the ancient market cross, and at the upper end is a quaint old brick and timber building, with well-carved corner-posts and spars supporting the jutting upper-storey, which in former days, when Elstow was a more important place than now, served as a market-house, or moot-hall. In the large upper room the village dancers held their revels when the cold of winter drove them in from the green. The cottage where Bunyan was born, if its site was ever accurately known, has long since passed away. That occupied by him after his first marriage, and where his children were born, is still standing, but modern repairs have robbed it of all its picturesqueness. John Bunyan was born in the year 1628, a year remarkable in English history for the 'Petition of Right,' and the assassination of the Duke of Buckingham. His father was a tinker ('a mender of pots and kettles,' writes Charles Doe), or what we should now call a 'whitesmith,' or 'brazier,' for he had a settled home at Elstow. Still, as we know from contemporary literature1, his calling was low and disreputable, 'of that rank,' in his own words, 'that is the meanest and most despised in the land.' Although the surname of Bunyan has now almost died out in Bedfordshire, it is of long-standing there, and was at one time very common 2. This effectually dispels the idea alluded to with favour by Sir Walter Scott, that Bunyan was of gypsy descent, to establish which a good deal of misdirected learning 1 See note referring to p. 297, 1 8. 2 Dr. Brown has proved from the evidence of assize-rolls, manorial court-rolls, wills, and other historical documents, that at one time the Bunyans were a yeoman family of good position. John Bunyan: His Life, Times, and Work, by John Brown, B.A., 1885. and research has been employed. Bunyan's inquiry of his father whether he was descended from the Israelites or no (G. A. § 18), is entirely beside the mark; for there is no reason to suppose that he could have had any acquaintance with the strange hallucination that the gypsies are to be regarded as the representatives of the ten lost tribes. The name Bunyan appeared in many different forms in those days of unsettled orthography and phonetic spelling. Bunyan himself spelt it in several different ways. In the parish register of Elstow we find Bonion, Bunion, Bonyon, Bunyon, and Bunyan. The last form, which has become universally accepted, is certainly the least frequent. Poor as his parents were they did not neglect to send their son John to school. However, he learnt but little, and that little he confesses with shame he soon lost, almost utterly.' His handwriting, as exhibited in the margin of the copy of Fox's Acts and Monuments, which was his companion in prison, is a vile scrawl, on a par with the badness of the spelling and the rudeness of his doggrel rhymes. His boyhood was spent in his native village, where he grew up what Coleridge calls 'a bitter blackguard'; having, according to his own confession, 'but few equals' even when a child for cursing, swearing, lying, and blaspheming the name of God.' The unmeasured language in which he laments his youthful misdeeds has led to a very mistaken estimate of his character, which, handed on from one writer to another until it became almost a matter of faith, Southey was the first to demolish. The wickedness of the tinker,' he writes, 'has been greatly overcharged, and it is taking the language of self-accusation too literally to pronounce of John Bunyan that he was at any time depraved.' It is certain from his own solemn declaration when, at a later period of his life, charges of immorality were brought against him, that he was entirely guiltless of sins of impurity (G. A. § 313– 317). There is not a shadow of evidence that he was ever drunk in his life. He acknowledges to a habit of profane swearing, acquired when a child, and indulged in without restraint till after his marriage, so that he became celebrated as 'a town-swearer'; shocking those who were by no means spotless themselves with the abundance and vehemence of his oaths. But the offences of which he speaks with the deepest |