Elstow 

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Historical notes about the Parish of Elstow

Elstow is famous everywhere, and will live with the name of England because it is John Bunyan’s village. We must read his Grace Abounding if we would know what happened here to make this corner of the earth for ever part of the history of mankind.

He was born; at this font he was baptised. In this tower he rang the bells, this very bell that still rings out across the green. On this green he played that game of tipcat in the midst of which he heard a voice like the voice that came to Paul on the road to Damascus, which said, Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to Heaven, or have thy sins and go to hell?

In this church he heard that sermon on the keeping of the Sabbath day which sent him home with a heavy burden on his spirit. Here is the cottage he lived in, the House of the Interpreter, the little Moot Hall which held all the terrible temptations of Vanity Fair. For those who love John Bunyan and know that the Everlasting Tinker has meant to the world there is no place like Elstow. It is the holy of holies in a Bunyan pilgrim’s progress.

John Bunyan (1628 – 1688) himself would know it still, with the old houses in which the pilgrims would lodge on their progress from abbey to abbey. Here stood one of the richest and oldest houses of nuns in all England, founded in the Conqueror’s reign by his niece. Her name and her lands are in Domesday Book, and the nuns were holding fairs in Elstow centuries before John Bunyan saw his Vanity Fair. They had their own pillory and their own gallows.

The abbey and the nuns had been gone a hundred years when there was brought to this church a child “of that rank that is meanest and most despised of all the families in the land,” as he said himself, and yet they brought him to this font for baptism, and led him to this church for worship, and sent him to a school to read and write.

The church would give little John his first sense of wonder, for it has wondrous things to see that he must have looked at a hundred times. He rang the bell hanging in this strong and solid 15^th century campanile which he feared might fall on him for his wickedness in ringing. It stands a little way off the church, these stone walls being the very walls in which the nuns would come to sing and pray. It is all that is left of the glory of the abbey as it stood in the 15^th century, and it has lost the chancel and the lady chapel which linked it with the tower. In its east wall are carved brackets which held medieval images.

Perhaps the oldest thing here is a fascinating group of carved stone figures in a small arch over the Norman doorway; they are early Norman, and show Christ with his hand raised in blessing, St Peter with a key, and St John with a book. There is Norman sculpture also on the font, which rests on four animals 800 years old, the bowl carved with 13^th century tracery and foliage. It was by this font in which he himself had been christened that John Bunyan stood in 1650 at the baptism of his little blind child Mary (1650 – 1663). She was to be a pathetic figure in Bedford when Bunyan was in prison, for she stood at the prison door selling shoelaces.

More thrilling even than the font to which they brought little John Bunyan is the corner of the church railed off with balustrading three feet high, for at these rails John Bunyan used to kneel and from this table he received communion. Many a good sermon he heard from this oak pulpit, he tells us in his books.

The great Norman piers are still standing in this nave which has become the church of Elstow after a long and broken history; they support the clerestory in the eastern part, 13^th century piers with richly carved capitals supporting the western roof. The fine stone corbels, bearing the timber of the roof, with heads of men and women and lions carved on them, came with the clerestory in the 15^th century.

A delightful little room is reached down four steps from a tiny door in the wall; it was probably the ancient chapter house, and it has a vaulted ceiling with stone ribs curving down on to a marble pillar. The pictures in the windows are chiefly from the imagination of John Bunyan, most of them from the Pilgrim’s Progress, and one form the Holy War showing a vigorous scene outside a castle with the drawbridge raised. On one side of the moat stands Diabolos, and on the other Emmanuel in armour of shining gold.

Two people who sat in this church in the days of the nuns have left us their portraits in brass. One of them has come down to us after 500 years, that of Margery Argentine in a widow’s veil with a little dog at her feet. They laid her here in 1427. The other portrait shows us her granddaughter Elizabeth Harvey, the Abbess of Elstow; she placed the portrait here in her own time, and it is the first brass of an abbess in all England, one of only two. She died in 1524, little dreaming that all but a little of what she held so precious was to be swept away in 20 years. She is a magnificent figure in a flowing gown, veil, and mantle, with a ring on her finger and her staff on her arm.

In a 16^th century tomb sleeps Isabel Harvey, wife of Sir Humphrey Radcliffe who kneels beside her under his painted heraldry. His father lived in the abbey after the dissolution of the monasteries, when Henry gave these placed to his friends. Close by him sleep those who followed him in possession, one of them Thomas Hillerson, who built a house behind the church in the year Shakespeare died. The white porch of the house still stands with his arms on it, and it is a thrilling thing to see, for Bunyan is supposed to have thought of it when he was writing Pilgrim’s Progress, and to have made it the House of the Interpreter, where Christian’s wife came after, singing so that those inside leapt for joy to meet her, “and one smiled, and another smiled, and they all smiled, for joy that Christiana was become a pilgrim.”

The white porch, the cottage where he lived and plied his tinker’s trade, the stump of the market cross on the green near which he saw his vision, and the old Moot Hall, are the four things in Elstow outside the church that Bunyan would recognise today. The Moot Hall has suffered by the bricking up of its doors and windows, but it is a handsome place with overhanging timbers and red bricks, a stirring sight to come upon on a village green.

It was on this green, in this market hall, that John Bunyan set the Vanity Fair to which Christian and Faithful came. This is how he pictured it.

Vanity Fair

The fair is no new-erected business, but a thing of ancient standing; I will show you the original of it. Almost five thousand years agone there were pilgrims walking to the Celestial City, as these two honest persons are: and Beelzebub, Apollyon, and Legion, with their companions, perceiving by the path that their way to the city lay through this town of Vanity, contrived here to set up a fair, wherein should be sold all sorts of vanity, and that it should last all the year long. At this fair are all such merchandise sold as houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, pleasures; and delights of all sorts. And, moreover at this fair there are at all times to be seen jugglings, cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that of every sort.

Now the way to the Celestial City lies just through the town where this fair is kept, and he that go to the city and yet not go through this town, must needs go out of the world.

These pilgrims must needs go through this fair, but behold, even as they entered, all the people in the fair were moved, and the town itself, as it were, in a hubbub about them, and that for several reasons.

First, the pilgrims were clothed with such raiment as was diverse from the raiment of any that traded at the fair. The people of the fair made a great gazing upon them; some said they were fools, some they were bedlams, and some they were outlandish men. Secondly, as they wondered at their apparel, so they did likewise at their speech, for few could understand what they said; from one end of the fair to the other they seemed barbarians each to the other. Thirdly, that which did not a little amuse the merchandisers was that these pilgrims set very light by all their wares; they cared not so much as to look upon them; and if they called upon them to buy they would put their fingers in their ears, and cry, Turn away mine eyes from beholding the vanity! and look upwards, signifying that their trade and traffic was in heaven.

John Bunyan and his World

John Bunyan was a tinker; it was his father’s trade and his. Honest men in their craft, they were not exactly poor, and in one thing they were not above this gypsy-like and rather despised race men who mend our kettles: they had a permanent dwelling place.

He lived a life of adventure within himself which we can hardly believe possible in these days, and it is true that the astonishing story of this countryman of ours began when he was ten. He was a child in the heart of Puritan England, and the spirit of that astonishing time was everywhere about him. Before he was ten, says Macaulay, his playful hours were interrupted by fits of remorse and despair, and his sleep was disturbed by dreams of fiends who were trying to fly away with him. He passed through his school life in Bedford haunted by the thought of some terrible danger that lay in front of him. He felt that God was angry with him, and so he grew up, a child of shadows and fears, a Bedford schoolboy and then a village tinker, until the day came when a hand was laid upon him which sharply stopped his thinking of himself and brought him face to face with events that were shaping a new life of the English people.

It was the hand of the recruiting sergeant, and it marched off John Bunyan, a motherless lad of seventeen, to serve the army in the Civil War. He saw some fighting, but he was so little concerned with the political events that were shaking the land that we are not quite sure on which side he fought. The thing that moved him most of all in his soldier’s career was the fact that a man who had taken his place in the siege of Leicester was killed by a shot from the town. God himself had intervened to save John Bunyan. That was how he felt about the way of God in the world.

He returned from the war in 1647, a humble mender of pots and pans and kettles, and at twenty he married a good poor woman who brought him, out of her poverty, as rich a dowry as John Bunyan ever had. It was her liberty, two religious books which set John Bunyan thinking.

They were as poor as might be, he wrote, “not having so much household stuff as a dish or a spoon between them;” but these books were his wife’s good blessing. One was a little book on The Practise of Piety, written by Lewis Bayly (c1575 – 1631) at Evesham in 1612.

Bayly became Bishop of Bangor, and fifty editions of his book appeared in sixty years. The other book was The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven (Arthur Dent (? – c 1607))

“wherein every man may clearly see whether he shall be saved or lost; set forth dialogue-wise for the better understanding of the simple, by Arthur Dent, Preacher of the Word of God at South Shoebury in Essex.”

These two forgotten books were perhaps the first things that turned the thoughts of John Bunyan into the way he was to travel so famously and so long. The Plain Man’s Pathway was a small square volume bound in vellum, written in the form of a dialogue between a plain honest man, and ignorant man, a caviller, and a preacher, sitting one day under an oak tree talking of heavenly things.

It is odd to read this little book today, for some of its pages might have been written for this very age. The good parson of Shoebury complained that the scriptures were esteemed no more than old shoes, and preachers no more than cobblers. Every Jack would be a gentleman and Joan was as good as My Lady, and as for their apparel one could hardly tell the mistress from the maid. There were many people who even slept on the Sabbath!

It was this book in particular that made a new man of John Bunyan. He began to read the Bible. He joined the local Baptists, and he began to preach. It seems a very simple way of recording the change that came over this wondrous man, but we see that these two steps were vital when we remember two things – the manner of man John Bunyan was, and the astonishing age he lived in.

The God of John Bunyan was the stern, unbending Judge of all the earth, who would have nothing to do with a man who played tipcat on Sunday, or danced on village greens, or loved church bells. The typical Puritan mind must have wondered what God was about when He made the sparrow chirp and the lark to sing, and the great choir of the sky to chorus every morning as the Sun come peeping over the hills. They must have wondered what God was about when He made young lambs to skip in the meadows, and dogs and cats to play. They must have thought a rippling brook a sinful sound, and the flickering and dancing of the sunlight on the grass, and the murmuring of the wind in the trees, the waving of a field of corn in the wind on a Sabbath day, the whistling of the cricket and the croaking of the toad, the wild rush of a horse that is free, even the shadows of the clouds passing by, must have bewildered them. For He who made us all made these, and was it not a sin against Eternal God to laugh and sing and dance and skip, and play with sticks and balls, and ring church bells?

Poor John Bunyan! This big full-blooded buoyant youth, loving life like a child finds it, his brain surging with imagination, a natural leader in games and playing them with gusto, found suddenly that all this was wrong. It was sin, and he was saturated with it through and through. To ring church bells was sin; even to look at bells being rung was sin. Who knew that as he stood there looking at the ringing the church tower would not fall on him as a punishment from a watchful and resentful God?

It is true that Bunyan knew the Bible as well as any man of his day, but he was far from realising the truth which someone has put for us so well, that, though the Bible holds religion enshrined as a jewel in a casket, it is not true that everything contained in the Bible is religion. He believed terribly in the Old Testament and the Jewish reign of law, the law of prohibitions, which could not be evaded and could not be kept but was bound to bring fearful punishment. He believed in a Devil for ever going about the world urging men to break his law. Everlasting torment was intensely real to him. An inexorable God was intensely real to him. It never seemed to occur to the men of Bunyan’s day that Christianity rests on the teaching of Christ Himself. It was not the simple message from Galilee that touched these men’s lives and set their hearts aglow with something not of this world. It was the creeds that men have built up, the artificial systems of theology fashioned out of the simple words of Jesus, that frightened men, and saved them by fear.

We see the mellowing process come upon John Bunyan as he writes Pilgrim’s Progress (he softens down until in the end his characters are dancing and enjoying music), but it was in this atmosphere of terror, with a dread of an unbending and forbidding God, that he grew up and came into his work. Some of his sixty books could not be printed now, and no man in Christendom would believe what they say. Hard and harsh and terrible they are. And yet, as we read on and on, we see the hardness and the harshness and bitterness melting in Bunyan, until his kindness and mercy of what he writes fill us with a love of him and brings tears to the eye.

Such was the man John Bunyan. Such was the God he believed in. Such was the faith that moved him. What of the country in which he found himself, this England of ours in those days?

It was not yet a free country. For centuries after Magna Carta the minds of Englishmen were captive. Liberty was not yet crowned with the right of every man to think and speak and write the thing he pleased.

Strange it is to look back to those days, with their majestic roll-call of immortal men, and to try to imagine the sort of life going on in our Island Home. Those who know no better talk of the good old days, but not one wise man is there who would not rather die than have them back.

The England of John Bunyan was in the grip of ignorance and superstition and disease. It witnessed the most astounding outburst of human genius that has ever been known in the world, and yet this land was devil-ridden and witch-possessed. Prince and peasant believed it; Bunyan and Shakespeare and William Hervey believed it. The king on his throne, the judge on the bench, Cromwell at the head of his army and in the secrecy of his chamber, all believed that Satan stalked the land with agents in every town and hamlet, sworn to do his will. Any woman upon whom age had laid a heavy hand, any woman with a curious oddity of any sort, was in danger of being burned, hanged, or drowned as a witch. Elizabeth set up a gibbet at Windsor for the execution of anyone who dared to venture there from plague-stricken London; James the First has a gibbet, a fire, or a pond ready everywhere for the agents of Satan and workers of mischief. When a storm at sea disturbed his royal digestion James knew that old John Fian had been a work, a malignant Prospero who, for raising the storm, had his nails torn from their fingers and his limbs crushed in the presence of the King.

It was this wretched King James who caused an Act to be passed, extending over the whole lifetime of Bunyan, which made it punishable with death to remove or conjure up an evil spirit, to consult with or feed one, or take up a dead body for use in magic, or to injure cattle by means of charms. Before Bunyan died seventy thousand people had been martyred under this act.

While these atrocious follies were being practised with a religious zeal which Bunyan himself would heartily approve (he describes approvingly the binding of a man with his head held over a fire to drive the devil out of him), scientists and quacks were ruining their health and the fortunes of their dupes in trying to convert base metals into gold and to find the fabled secret of life which was to give eternal your, health, and beauty.

Two pictures of this Merrie England stand out in the mind and are not to be forgotten. One is the life of the Village Green. Well did John Bunyan know his Vanity Fair; he had seen it on a hundred greens, with its bull-baiting, its cock-fighting, the dancing round the maypole, the cakes and ale, and all that whirling merry-go-round which stands out as vividly in the history of the Village Green as in the pages of The Pilgrim’s Progress. The other picture that Merrie England brings to mind is the picture of an English Court of Justice. Well may we ask if anything in all the world was ever more cruel than the cruelty of justice in the days when the very flower of the English Mind was blossoming in our land. There was an English judge whose boast was that he had hanged more people than all his predecessors since the Conquest. It is recorded that a passer-by in what we now call Oxford Street saw a cartload of children on their way to be hanged at Tyburn, and “never did he hear children cry so.” Such things happened in John Bunyan’s England, and in Cromwell’s England. Slowly, very slowly, through the dim mists of haunting and fear and torturing doubt, the light came to these Islands.

It was in the midst of Cromwell’s rule that Bunyan became a preacher. He was at this time a happy man, fairly prosperous in business and devoted to his home. Especially he was attached to his little blind daughter, whom he loved with all the tenderness of his rugged nature and all the sincerity of his heart. He had settled his doubt about himself. He was breaking the shackles of his superstitions. He lived a simple quiet life, praising God for his great mercies, preaching to a congregation which hung upon his every word, and devoting himself to the happiness and business of his little home. He married a second wife in 1659 (Elizabeth ?), a noble woman who made an admirable mother to his children.

Into the midst of this peaceful tide of his career came the great blow to his life – the great blessings as it was to be to us. Charles the Second was back again, to stain the throne with all his infamies. Under a new Act of Parliament, by one of the meanest things a Government ever did, Bunyan was arrested for preaching without a license and refusing to keep silent. He was thrown into gaol for twelve years. We can read the story in his own words in this book, and we may pass it over briefly here. The thought of his suffering family tortured him. He spent his time in prison making shoelaces to keep his children. But he knew their privations, and he cried out concerning his little blind daughter that he could not bear even to let the wind blow on her, and now she must suffer cold and hunger, she must beg, she must be beaten, and “yet I must, I must do it.” There is a story that he fashioned a flute out of the rail of his prison stool, and that when the gaoler, roused by sounds of music from his cell, was opening the door, he quietly replaced the rail so that the searchers were unable to solve the mystery, “nor during the remainder of Bunyan’s residence in gaol did they ever discover how the music had been produced.

In prison he was allowed some liberty, a kindly gaoler permitting him even to go into Bedford or occasionally up to London, and all the time he was able to write. He was free for a short time at the end of six years, and was released in 1672. A year or two later he was imprisoned a third time, and when he finally emerged from prison in 1676 he carried with him the manuscript of the first part of The Pilgrim’s Progress.

The rest of his life was easy and happy. He lived in Bedford and was widely known as Bishop Bunyan, and he came to London at least once every year. People would flock in multitudes to hear him preach; he had only to appear in London and a vast crowd would gather anywhere. He was what we should call a great success. He spoke to thousands and wrote for hundreds of thousands, and yet he remained a simple countryman. He never altered. He had no vanity. He kept doing the same work all the time. When his books had made him famous for over the world he was just John Bunyan the Bedford preacher, and wanted nothing more. Dr G. M/ Trevelyan (1876 – 1962) has said of him that this man who has written himself into immortality had never an ambition in anything he wrote save to turn poor sinners to repentance. He was writing books for more than half his life; he wrote four before he went to prison, eleven while he was in prison, and more than forty after he was free. Though only three of them count today and the rest were never read, they are all a remarkable revelation of the religious feelings of “God’s poor servant John Bunyan.” He was writing to the very end, and before the printer could make the corrections on some of his proofs the hand that made them was for ever still.

He died in doing good. He was concerned for the unhappiness of an old man’s son who was disinherited by his father, and he rode from London to Reading and back to save the young man’s fortunes. He saved them, but he caught cold in the rain, and arrived at the door of the grocer’s shop of his loving friend Mr Thomas Strudwick (1613 – 1697) on Holborn Bridge tired out and wet through. In six days he had crossed the river and joined the company of the Shining Ones, and heard the trumpets on the other side. He was buried in Bunhill Fields, (City Rd, London EC1Y 2BG) and people used to ask to be buried as near to him as they could.

When we consider his parentage (Thomas and Margaret), his schooling, his trade, and his environment, we are filled with astonishment at the eternal qualities of this immortal man. What he was was born in him. The glow was in him from his childhood. If he is explainable at all he is explainable like Shakespeare. All that the man became was in the boy. Religion caught hold of him as the stage caught hold of Shakespeare, but while Shakespeare looked out over all mankind John Bunyan looked within himself. He never quite escaped from the cramped theology of his time, and yet we are astonished at the softening of his nature and the broadening of his faith, and at the growth within him of the peace that passeth understanding. He was perhaps the most oppressed Nonconformist in our history, yet he bore no grudge to the end.

He is our immortal tinker. He is one for ever with the fame of our great Island Story. But he is more that one of us, for he belongs to mankind, and after all these crowded years he stands for all the nations, for every kindly serious man, among the Shining Ones.

 

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