John Bunyan was an English writer and non-conformist preacher, best remembered as the author of the Christian allegory The Pilgrim's Progress.

Born in 1628 in the village of Elstow, near Bedford, he joined the Parliamentary Army at the age of 16 during the first stage of the English Civil War. After three years, he returned to Elstow and followed his father into the trade of a tinker (a metal smith). After his marriage in 1649, he read the two books that his wife owned - both of which were religious – and became frightened that he might go to hell because of some of the bad things he had done.

So he started to attend his local parish church, as people in those days were supposed to worship God in the Church of England. But there were groups of people who wished to worship God in other ways, known as “non-conformists”. In 1653, a sect of non-conformists had taken over St John’s Church in Bedford, and John Bunyan joined them and later became a preacher. But after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, things became more difficult, and the religious freedom that allowed groups of non-conformists to establish, was curtailed, and everybody was required to believe what the Church of England told them.

But Bunyan did not agree and continued preaching his own ideas of Christianity. He and other non-conformists often met in secret at a mill in Wheathampstead in Hertfordshire, in what is now the site of the John Bunyan pub. But in the end, he was arrested and spent the next twelve years, 1660-1672, in gaol for refusing to give up his preaching. The gaol was at the top of Silver Street in the centre of Bedford, only 5 minutes’ walk from his home.

During this time, he wrote a spiritual autobiography, ‘Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners’, and began work on his most famous book, ‘The Pilgrim's Progress’, which became one of the most published books in the English language with 1,300 editions having been printed by 1938, 250 years after his death. The book, which is a story about a man trying to lead a good Christian life, has been translated into more languages than any other book except the Bible.

Bunyan's later years, following release from a further period of imprisonment, were spent in relative comfort and he continued to be a popular author and preacher, and became pastor of the Bedford non-conformist meeting. He died on 31 August 1688 aged 59, after falling ill on a journey to London and is buried in Bunhill Fields, a non-conformist burial ground in London’s City Road.

Click below to hear the hymn, 'He who would valiant be', based on The Pilgrim's Progress.