The Life of John Bunyan | Page 5

place of St. Helena, is derived from a Benedictine nunnery

founded in 1078 by Judith, niece of William the Conqueror, the
traitorous wife of the judicially murdered Waltheof, Earl of Huntingdon,
in honour of the mother of the Emperor Constantine. The parish church,
so intimately connected with Bunyan's personal history, is a fragment
of the church of the nunnery, with a detached campanile, or
"steeple-house," built to contain the bells after the destruction of the
central tower and choir of the conventual church. Few villages are so
little modernized as Elstow. The old half-timbered cottages with
overhanging storeys, peaked dormers, and gabled porches, tapestried
with roses and honeysuckles, must be much what they were in
Bunyan's days. A village street, with detached cottages standing in
gardens gay with the homely flowers John Bunyan knew and loved,
leads to the village green, fringed with churchyard elms, in the middle
of which is the pedestal or stump of the market-cross, and at the upper
end of the old "Moot Hall," a quaint brick and timber building, with a
projecting upper storey, a good example of the domestic architecture of
the fifteenth century, originally, perhaps, the Guesten-Hall of the
adjacent nunnery, and afterwards the Court House of the manor when
lay-lords had succeeded the abbesses - "the scene," writes Dr. Brown
"of village festivities, statute hirings, and all the public occasions of
village life." The whole spot and its surroundings can be but little
altered from the time when our hero was the ringleader of the youth of
the place in the dances on the greensward, which he tells us he found it
so hard to give up, and in "tip-cat," and the other innocent games which
his diseased conscience afterwards regarded as "ungodly practices."
One may almost see the hole from which he was going to strike his
"cat" that memorable Sunday afternoon when he silenced the inward
voice which rebuked him for his sins, and "returned desperately to his
sport again." On the south side of the green, as we have said, stands the
church, a fine though somewhat rude fragment of the chapel of the
nunnery curtailed at both ends, of Norman and Early English date,
which, with its detached bell tower, was the scene of some of the fierce
spiritual conflicts so vividly depicted by Bunyan in his "Grace
Abounding." On entering every object speaks of Bunyan. The pulpit - if
it has survived the recent restoration - is the same from which
Christopher Hall, the then "Parson" of Elstow, preached the sermon
which first awoke his sleeping conscience. The font is that in which he

was baptized, as were also his father and mother and remoter
progenitors, as well as his children, Mary, his dearly-loved blind child,
on July 20, 1650, and her younger sister, Elizabeth, on April 14, 1654.
An old oaken bench, polished by the hands of thousands of visitors
attracted to the village church by the fame of the tinker of Elstow, is
traditionally shown as the seat he used to occupy when he "went to
church twice a day, and that, too, with the foremost counting all things
holy that were therein contained." The five bells which hang in the
belfry are the same in which Bunyan so much delighted, the fourth bell,
tradition says, being that he was used to ring. The rough flagged floor,
"all worn and broken with the hobnailed boots of generations of
ringers," remains undisturbed. One cannot see the door, set in its solid
masonry, without recalling the figure of Bunyan standing in it, after
conscience, "beginning to be tender," told him that "such practice was
but vain," but yet unable to deny himself the pleasure of seeing others
ring, hoping that, "if a bell should fall," he could "slip out" safely
"behind the thick walls," and so "be preserved notwithstanding."
Behind the church, on the south side, stand some picturesque ivy-clad
remains of the once stately mansion of the Hillersdons, erected on the
site of the nunnery buildings in the early part of the seventeenth century,
with a porch attributed to Inigo Jones, which may have given Bunyan
the first idea of "the very stately Palace, the name of which was
Beautiful."
The cottage where Bunyan was born, between the two brooks in the
fields at Harrowden, has been so long destroyed that even the
knowledge of its site has passed away. That in which he lived for six
years (1649-1655) after his first marriage, and where his children were
born, is still standing in the village street, but modern reparations have
robbed it of all interest.
From this description of the surroundings among which Bunyan passed
the earliest and most impressionable years of his life, we pass to the
subject of our biography himself. The notion that Bunyan was