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He entered this world in a labourer's cottage of the humblest class, at the village of Elstow, about a mile from Bedford.
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 roadside 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.
Benedict of Caen was one of these, and he slipped off Roger de Roldeston's horse into a rushing stream, but was miraculously not drowned: and Robert of Noyon was another whom he picked up at Lambeth in the archbishop's train and put to school with the nuns at Elstow. These tender passages are to be contrasted with quite other sides to the man.
Curwin, had preached against Peto from the same pulpit, and had been rebuked from the rood-loft by another of the brethren, Father Elstow, who had continued declaiming until the King himself had fiercely intervened from the royal pew and bade him be silent. "The two are banished," said Cromwell, "but that is not the end of it. Their brethren will hear of it again.
Good Master Bunyan, of Elstow, might have added some pages to his account of Vanity Fair had he been with us. The women, be-patched, be-ruddled, and brazen; the men swaggering, roistering, cursing the brawling, the drabbing, and the drunkenness! It was a fit kingdom to be ruled over by such a court.
Thus he lived at home, and grew to manhood there, forming his ideas of men and things out of such opportunities as the Elstow neighbourhood afforded. From the time when the Reformation brought them a translation of it, the Bible was the book most read it was often the only book which was read in humble English homes.
No man of common-sense and common integrity can deny that Bunyan, the tinker of Elstow, was a practical atheist, a worthless contemptible infidel, a vile rebel to God and goodness, a common profligate. Now be astonished, O heaven, to eternity; and wonder, O earth and hell, while time endures. Behold this very man become a miracle of mercy, a mirror of wisdom, goodness, holiness, truth, and love.
He was not, however, a mere tramp or vagrant, as travelling tinkers were and usually are still, much less a disreputable sot, a counterpart of Shakespeare's Christopher Sly, but a man with a recognized calling, having a settled home and an acknowledged position in the village community of Elstow. The family was of long standing there, but had for some generations been going down in the world.
And who, looking back to the green spots in his childish experiences, does not bless the good Tinker of Elstow? And who, that has reperused the story of the Pilgrim at a maturer age, and felt the plummet of its truth sounding in the deep places of the soul, has not reason to bless the author for some timely warning or grateful encouragement?
Still the supinelness of the justices, and the connivance of the clergy, allowed the rabble youth to congregate on the Green at Elstow, summoned by the church bells to celebrate their sports and pastimes, as they had been in the habit of doing on the Lord's day.
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