John Bunyan: The Man, Preacher and Author

Abstract

John Bunyan (1628–88) was born at Elstow, near Bedford, England, the oldest son of a tinker. Although he speaks in his autobiography of his father’s family as ‘being of that rank that is meanest and most despised of all the families in the land’, his family had once been landed yeomen. Emphasis on his humble birth is hardly inverted snobbery; it is Bunyan’s way of attributing solely to God credit for what he had become. His education was undoubtedly slight. The only information on the subject is his own statement: ‘Notwithstanding the meanness and inconsiderableness of my parents, it pleased God to put it into their heart, to put me to school.’ If he did attend school, which may have been the grammar school at Bedford or the one in the neighbouring parish of Houghton Conquest, it seems that it was for only a short period. The year 1644 was a year of bereavement and adjustment for Bunyan. His mother died in June; his younger sister, Margaret, died in July, and his father married for the third time in August. In November he was summoned in a county levy for service in the Parliamentary Army, which opposed the Royalists (those who supported the King and the official Church of England) during the civil war which had broken out in England in 1642.