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 further
diminished by sale. 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. Thomas Bunyan, John Bunyan's father, was
born in the last days of Elizabeth, and was baptized February 24, 1603,
exactly a month before the great queen passed away. The mother of the
immortal Dreamer was one Margaret Bentley, who, like her husband, was a
native of Elstow and only a few months his junior. The details of her
mother's will, which is still extant, drawn up by the vicar of Elstow,
prove that, like her husband, she did not, in the words of Bunyan's
latest and most complete biographer, the Rev. Dr. Brown, "come of the
very squalid poor, but of people who, though humble in station, were yet
decent and worthy in their ways." John Bunyan's mother was his father's
second wife. The Bunyans were given to marrying early, and speedily
consoled themselves on the loss of one wife with the companionship of a
successor. Bunyan's grandmother cannot have died before February 24,
1603, the date of his father's baptism. But before the year was out his
grandfather had married again. His father, too, had not completed his
twentieth year when he married his first wife, Anne Pinney, January 10,
1623. She died in 1627, apparently without any surviving children, and
before the year was half-way through, on the 23rd of the following May,
he was married a second time to Margaret Bentley. At the end of
seventeen years Thomas Bunyan was again left a widower, and within two
months, with grossly indecent haste, he filled the vacant place with a
third wife. Bunyan himself cannot have been much more than twenty when