he married. We have no particulars of the death of his first wife. But
he had been married two years to his noble-minded second wife at the time
of the assizes in 1661, and the ages of his children by his first wife
would indicate that no long interval elapsed between his being left a
widower and his second marriage.

Elstow, which, as the birthplace of the author of "The Pilgrim's
Progress," has gained a world-wide celebrity, is a quiet little village,
which, though not much more than a mile from the populous and busy town
of Bedford, yet, lying aside from the main stream of modern life,
preserves its old-world look to an unusual degree. Its name in its
original form of "Helen-stow," or "Ellen-stow," the _stow_ or stockaded
place of St. Helena, is derived from a Benedictine nunnery founded in
1078 by Judith, niece of William the Conqueror, the traitorous wife of
the judicially murdered Waltheof, Earl of Huntingdon, in honour of the
mother of the Emperor Constantine. The parish church, so intimately
connected with Bunyan's personal history, is a fragment of the church of
the nunnery, with a detached campanile, or "steeple-house," built to
contain the bells after the destruction of the central tower and choir of
the conventual church. Few villages are so little modernized as Elstow.
The old half-timbered cottages with overhanging storeys, peaked dormers,
and gabled porches, tapestried with roses and honeysuckles, must be much
what they were in Bunyan's days. A village street, with detached
cottages standing in gardens gay with the homely flowers John Bunyan knew
and loved, leads to the village green, fringed with churchyard elms, in
the middle of which is the pedestal or stump of the market-cross, and at
the upper end of the old "Moot Hall," a quaint brick and timber building,
with a projecting upper storey, a good example of the domestic
architecture of the fifteenth century, originally, perhaps, the Guesten-
Hall of the adjacent nunnery, and afterwards the Court House of the manor