The Life of John Bunyan | Page 4

extant will,
carried on the occupation of a "petty chapman," or small retail dealer,
in his own freehold cottage, which he bequeathed, "with its
appurtenances," to his second wife, Ann, to descend, after her death, to
her stepson, his namesake, Thomas, and her own son Edward, in equal
shares. This cottage, which was probably John Bunyan's birthplace,
persistent tradition, confirmed by the testimony of local names,
warrants us in placing near the hamlet of Harrowden, a mile to the east
of the village of Elstow, at a place long called "Bunyan's End," where
two fields are still called by the name of "Bunyans" and "Further
Bunyans." This small freehold appears to have been all that remained,
at the death of John Bunyan's grandfather, of a property once
considerable enough to have given the name of its possessor to the
whole locality.
The family of Buingnon, Bunyun, Buniun, Boynon, Bonyon, or Binyan
(the name is found spelt in no fewer than thirty-four different ways, of
which the now-established form, Bunyan, is almost the least frequent)
is one that had established itself in Bedfordshire from very early times.
The first place in connection with which the name appears is Pulloxhill,
about nine miles from Elstow. In 1199, the year of King John's
accession, the Bunyans had approached still nearer to that parish. One
William Bunion held land at Wilstead, not more than a mile off. In
1327, the first year of Edward III., one of the same name, probably his
descendant, William Boynon, is found actually living at Harrowden,
close to the spot which popular tradition names as John Bunyan's
birthplace, and was the owner of property there. We have no further
notices of the Bunyans of Elstow till the sixteenth century. We then
find them greatly fallen. Their ancestral property seems little by little to
have passed into other hands, until in 1542 nothing was left but "a
messuage and pightell (1) with the appurtenances, and nine acres of
land." This small residue other entries on the Court Rolls show to have
been still further diminished by sale. The field already referred to,
known as "Bonyon's End," was sold by "Thomas Bonyon, of Elstow,
labourer," son of William Bonyon, the said Thomas and his wife being

the keepers of a small road-side inn, at which their overcharges for their
home-baked bread and home-brewed beer were continually bringing
them into trouble with the petty local courts of the day. Thomas
Bunyan, John Bunyan's father, was born in the last days of Elizabeth,
and was baptized February 24, 1603, exactly a month before the great
queen passed away. The mother of the immortal Dreamer was one
Margaret Bentley, who, like her husband, was a native of Elstow and
only a few months his junior. The details of her mother's will, which is
still extant, drawn up by the vicar of Elstow, prove that, like her
husband, she did not, in the words of Bunyan's latest and most
complete biographer, the Rev. Dr. Brown, "come of the very squalid
poor, but of people who, though humble in station, were yet decent and
worthy in their ways." John Bunyan's mother was his father's second
wife. The Bunyans were given to marrying early, and speedily consoled
themselves on the loss of one wife with the companionship of a
successor. Bunyan's grandmother cannot have died before February 24,
1603, the date of his father's baptism. But before the year was out his
grandfather had married again. His father, too, had not completed his
twentieth year when he married his first wife, Anne Pinney, January 10,
1623. She died in 1627, apparently without any surviving children, and
before the year was half-way through, on the 23rd of the following May,
he was married a second time to Margaret Bentley. At the end of
seventeen years Thomas Bunyan was again left a widower, and within
two months, with grossly indecent haste, he filled the vacant place with
a third wife. Bunyan himself cannot have been much more than twenty
when he married. We have no particulars of the death of his first wife.
But he had been married two years to his noble-minded second wife at
the time of the assizes in 1661, and the ages of his children by his first
wife would indicate that no long interval elapsed between his being left
a widower and his second marriage.
Elstow, which, as the birthplace of the author of "The Pilgrim's
Progress," has gained a world-wide celebrity, is a quiet little village,
which, though not much more than a mile from the populous and busy
town of Bedford, yet, lying aside from the main stream of modern life,
preserves its old-world look to an unusual degree. Its name in its
original form of "Helen-stow," or "Ellen-stow," the STOW or
stockaded