On 12 November 1660 John Bunyan was standing, Bible in hand, in a barn in the village of Lower Samsell. He was praying with the local people and preparing to preach to them when a constable entered and arrested him. Bunyan was called before the Bedfordshire magistrates and questioned about his activities. After a preliminary hearing he waited in gaol for seven weeks before being tried at the quarter-sessions. The indictment was, in Bunyan's words, ‘That John Bunyan of the town of Bedford, labourer, being a person of such and such conditions, he hath (since such a time) devilishly and perniciously abstained from coming to church to hear divine service, and is a common upholder of several unlawful meetings and conventicles, to the great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of this kingdom, contrary to the laws of our sovereign lord the king, &c’.

The king was Charles II, recently restored to his father's throne, initiating a period when traditional hierarchies were reintroduced, old scores were settled, and religious dissent, in person or in print, rigorously policed. While the coming decades would see brief episodes of strategic reduction in the persecution of religious Nonconformists, this was a dangerous time to follow the dictates of conscience rather than the law. Bunyan was charged under the Elizabethan Act for Retaining the Queen's Subjects in their Due Obedience of 1593. This law was originally a response to separatist Puritan churches and was used again in 1660 to enforce religious conformity. From the wording of the indictment it might only have been Bunyan's attendance at the wrong sort of religious meetings that was the problem. But as accounts of his trial show, Bunyan was a more troublesome, even threatening, figure, an unlicensed preacher, and this was the true reason for his arrest and prosecution. After formally joining the Bedford church in 1655, the year when John Gifford died and was succeeded by John Burton, Bunyan swiftly became active, not only as a member of the congregation but as what we would today call a ‘lay’, or unordained, preacher. To be admitted to the type of church that Bunyan joined required making a formal profession of faith, today often known as either a 'spiritual autobiography’ or a ‘conversion narrative’.