Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 07:1 (Winter 1993)
Article: Mistress Mary Bunyan: First Wife Of John Bunyan
Author: Martha Linda Marion Montgomery

PP 7:1 (Winter 1993) p. 12

Mistress Mary Bunyan:
First Wife Of John Bunyan

Linda Marion Montgomery

In seventeenth-century England, a young girl came to the village of Elstow to be the wife of a tinker. History does not tell us where she came from. Possibly she was working as a servant girl near the town of Newport Pagnell, when she met her husband who was stationed there as a member of the Parliamentary army. When his service was over, they married and moved back to his home village of Elstow.

It would never have occurred to Mary that her good man, John Bunyan, would be held in everlasting remembrance. She lived and died with no dreams of worldly fame. She was a poor girl who had married a poor man. John once wrote that they did not have “so much household stuff as a dish or a spoon betwixt us both.”

They moved into a humble thatched cottage by the roadside, which still stands today. There is a notice over the doorway: “John Bunyan ... lived in this cottage after his marriage in 1649.”

Mary set up housekeeping. She probably tended a small garden, preserved and cooked their food, made their clothes, soap, candles, and other necessities. She might have sold vegetables or hand work to people passing by her home on their way to Bedford, a town a mile away.

Their cottage had a lean-to forge at the south end where John worked as a tinker repairing the tools and utensils of neighbors. Often his trade took him wandering about the countryside, working at lonely farms or setting up shop at a fair ground, or on the outskirts of a nearby town.

Four children were born to this marriage: Mary, who was blind, Elizabeth, John, and Thomas.

Mary had been strictly brought up. She often told John what a godly man her father was. He would reprove and correct vice both in his house and amongst his neighbors. She knew her letters, being educated above the average of her station. When her father died, he left her two pious books: The Pathway to Heaven by Arthur Dent and The Practice of Piety by Lewis Bailey.

John Bunyan loved this woman whom it had been “his mercy to marry.” He said, “My mercy was to light upon a wife whose father was counted godly.”

Mary brought to her new home all of the memories of that godly home in which she was raised, and brightened the home with knowledge of the presence of the love of Christ. Her spiritual influence upon her husband was tremendous.

PP 7:1 (Winter 1993) p. 13

Perhaps, in a sense, John Bunyan’s fame rests upon the devotion and unrecorded sacrifices of this village girl, because she was his partner through several years of supreme crisis and conflict of s...