Elstow

Coordinates: 52°06′25″N 0°27′53″W / 52.1069°N 0.4648°W / 52.1069; -0.4648

Elstow is a village and civil parish in the English county of Bedfordshire.

John Bunyan, was born here – at Bunyan's End, which lay approximately halfway between the hamlet of Harrowden and Elstow's High Street.

History

Countess Judith, niece of William the Conqueror, founded a Benedictine nunnery in Elstow in the year 1078. The Elstow nuns came from wealthy families and each came with an endowment of money and/or lands.

In 1538 Elstow Abbey was valued as being the eighth richest nunnery in England. On 26 August 1539, the Abbess was forced to surrender the Abbey, the manor of Elstow and all the Abbey's other lands and estates throughout England, to King Henry VIII, as part of his Dissolution of the Monasteries.

So large and significant was the Abbey at Elstow that, even after the dissolution, the building was being considered for elevation to cathedral status, but this never transpired.

South of the village, from 1942 to 1946, was the site of the munitions factory ROF Elstow, about which the author H.E.Bates wrote The Tinkers of Elstow (1946).