The year was closing gloomily, with ominous forecasts of the coming hurricane, when the babe who was destined to leave so imperishable a name in English literature, first saw the light in an humble cottage in an obscure Bedfordshire village.  His father, Thomas Bunyan, though styling himself in his will by the more dignified title of “brazier,” was more properly what is known as a “tinker”; “a mender of pots and kettles,” according to Bunyan’s contemporary biographer, Charles Doe.  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.  Bunyan’s grandfather, Thomas Bunyan, as we learn from his still extant will, carried on the occupation of a “petty chapman,” or small retail dealer, in his own freehold cottage, which he bequeathed, “with its appurtenances,” to his second wife, Ann, to descend, after her death, to her stepson, his namesake, Thomas, and her own son Edward, in equal shares.  This cottage, which was probably John Bunyan’s birthplace, persistent tradition, confirmed by the testimony of local names, warrants us in placing near the hamlet of Harrowden, a mile to the east of the village of Elstow, at a place long called “Bunyan’s End,” where two fields are still called by the name of “Bunyans” and “Further Bunyans.”  This small freehold appears to have been all that remained, at the death of John Bunyan’s grandfather, of a property once considerable enough to have given the name of its possessor to the whole locality.

The family of Buingnon, Bunyun, Buniun, Boynon, Bonyon, or Binyan (the name is found spelt in no fewer than thirty-four different ways, of which the now-established form, Bunyan, is almost the least frequent) is one that had established itself in Bedfordshire from very early times.  The first place in connection with which the name appears is Pulloxhill, about nine miles from Elstow.  In 1199, the year of King John’s accession, the Bunyans had approached still nearer to that parish.  One William Bunion held land at Wilstead, not more than a mile off.  In 1327, the first year of Edward iii., one of the same name, probably his descendant, William Boynon, is found actually living at Harrowden, close to the spot which popular tradition names as John Bunyan’s birthplace, and was the owner of property there.  We have no further notices of the Bunyans of Elstow till the sixteenth century.  We then find them greatly fallen.  Their ancestral property seems little by little to have passed into other hands, until in 1542 nothing was left but “a messuage and pightell {1} with the appurtenances, and nine acres of land.”  This small residue other entries on the Court Rolls show to have been still