My father’s house being of that rank that is meanest and most despised of all the families in the land.
BUNYAN1
BUNYANS had lived in and around Elstow, just south of Bedford on the London road, since at least the twelfth century. Early forms of the name suggest a French origin. It is ironical that John Bunyan, whose prose is often praised for its Anglo-Saxon purity, may descend from ancestors who came over with the Conqueror. Perhaps they were employees of the wealthy nunnery of Elstow, founded soon after the Conquest.2
But the family into which John Bunyan was born was no different from any other smallholding family. His ancestors were selling bits and pieces of land in the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth, until most of it had gone. Thomas Bunyan, John’s great-great-grandfather, was described as a ‘victualler, common brewer of beer’ in 1542; he and his wife were many times fined for infringing the assizes of beer and of bread. Under Mary I Thomas Bunyan, with other Elstow villagers, was summoned before the Privy Council for some unspecified offence: perhaps he was already a protestant? John’s grandfather, also Thomas, described himself as a ‘brazier’ and ‘petty chapman’. He was in trouble with the ecclesiastical officials in 1617 for calling the churchwardens liars. He sold more land, bringing the family holding down to nine acres. When he died in 1641 he seems to have had little to leave except his cottage; he bequeathed 6d to John. But at least he made a will, as the very poor did not, and he made a gentleman his executor. He signed with a mark.3
Bunyan’s own father, also called Thomas, lived from 1603 to 1676. He was so poor that his one-hearthed house was exempt from the hearth tax in 1673–4.4 Bunyan’s male ancestors were long-lived. Women’s life-expectancy was much less. Bunyan’s grandfather had four wives, his father three, Bunyan himself two. At least four of his grandfather’s children died in infancy, as did Bunyan’s brother Charles. John Bunyan’s mother, an Elstow girl, was his father’s second wife. Their son was always inclined to make the most of his lowly origins, and he may have exaggerated in the passage quoted as epigraph to this chapter. But his was clearly a humble background. Bunyan’s father also made a will, which he too signed with a mark, presumably because he could not write. But his parents sent John ‘to school to learn both to read and write’. He succeeded ‘according to the rate of other poor men’s children’. He later jeered at ‘boys that go to the Latin school’ and ‘learn till they have learned the grounds of their grammar, and then they go home and forget all.’5
Bunyan’s father does not seem to have been a Puritan. John was impressed when his first wife told him what a godly man her father was, how strict and holy his life. Whereas, Bunyan hints, his own father did not ‘learn me to speak without this wicked way of swearing’. In 1663, when his father was still alive, he reflected ‘how happy a thing it would be, if God should use a child to beget his father to the faith.’ Bunyan himself claims to have had in his youth few equals for ‘cursing, swearing, lying and blaspheming’. The fact that he had nightmares about hell when he was nine or ten years old may have been due to the eloquence of the Vicar of Elstow. Christopher Hall, who succeeded as Vicar in 1639, does not seem to have been a convinced Puritan: he continued to use the traditional vestments after 1640. The fact that he christened his son Oliver may signify approval of Cromwell, or it may be evidence of the adaptability which enabled Hall to retain his living through all vicissitudes until at least 1664.6
Until the reformation the village of Elstow had been dominated by its well-endowed nunnery, whose last occupants were buried in Bedford in 1557 and 1558. By Bunyan’s time a manor-house had been built in the village, from the material of the convent, by Thomas Hillersden. His early death left his son a minor during the civil war. So Bunyan lacked first-hand contact with the sort of ‘little gentlemen’ whose ‘pets’ he was to deride later. Elstow also had its own fair, which lasted for three days in May and brought customers from far away. Vanity Fair in The Pilgrim’s Progress suggests that it made a considerable impression on the young John. And brewing was a sufficiently important occupation in the village for Elstow brewers to petition in 1638 for freedom from recently imposed restrictions. In return they offered to pay 20s apiece.7 This was a good instance of niggling (and expensive) interference with local economic life which helps to explain why in 1640 the government had no reserves of popular support to fall back on.
Before 1640 Bedfordshire was a relatively isolated agricultural county, and Elstow was still an open-field strip-cultivated village. Bedford had a population of around 2,000. It was to become important as the centre of a system of water communications which supplied the county with coal, salt, iron, wine, corn, and other consumer goods. On the day Bunyan was baptized in 1628 the Bedford Council went eagerly on record in favour of a scheme for making the river Ouse navigable to the sea. But it was not till the year of his death that the project was finally completed, to the town’s great economic advantage.8 Lace was the town’s principal manufacture, introduced by Huguenot refugees in Elizabeth’s reign.
Bedford was a sleepy country town, cut off by the bad roads which upset even the indefatigable Celia Fiennes when she rode them at the end of the century. From 1637 there was a weekly carrier, who took the century’s best-known letters from Dorothy Osborne to her future husband Sir William Temple. Not until 1678 was there a London to Bedford post, running three times a week. But in 1642 Bedford’s slumbers were sharply interrupted by the civil war, the marching and garrisoning of armies. There were skirmishes on the bridge in 1643 and in August 1645, two months after Oliver Cromwell had passed through with 600 horse and dragoons, which he stabled in St John’s church.9 Regular contact with London, and the general mobility of the revolutionary decades, must have transformed the area’s consciousness of a wider world. This too was part of Bunyan’s youthful experience.