The Life of John Bunyan [2]
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 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,
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 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,