Nicholas Ferrar, Deacon

Today the Church commemorates Nicholas Ferrar, deacon, whose household at Little Gidding sought to make the Book of Common Prayer the pattern of an entire life of worship, study, hospitality, and service.

Nicholas was born in London in 1592 into a prosperous merchant family. He studied at Cambridge and traveled on the continent before becoming deeply involved in the Virginia Company, in which his family had large interests. He served the company during years of political conflict and financial crisis and sat for a time in Parliament. When the company was dissolved, Nicholas turned away from the public career that seemed to lie before him.

The life that followed was not his work alone. In 1625 his mother, Mary Ferrar, purchased the manor of Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire. The property was neglected, and its small church had fallen into disuse. Nicholas’s sister Susanna, his nieces Mary and Anna Collett, and other relatives and servants joined the household. They repaired the house, restored the church, and began the experiment in Christian household life for which Little Gidding became famous.

Nicholas was ordained a deacon in the Church of England and remained a deacon for the rest of his life. His household ordered its days around the Church’s common prayer. Morning and Evening Prayer were offered in the church each day, and members of the household took turns in a longer cycle of intercession and psalmody so that prayer continued through much of the day and night. They kept the Church’s fasts, read Scripture, studied together, and ordered their common life around worship.

Prayer moved outward into service. The household educated children, cared for sick neighbors, distributed food and medicine, and used the savings created by fasting for the relief of the poor. Work, learning, and devotion belonged together. The point was not to escape ordinary life but to let ordinary life be trained by prayer.

The community’s best-known books were elaborate harmonies of the four Gospels. Members of the family cut and arranged printed Gospel texts so that parallel accounts could be read together, then decorated and bound the volumes with great care. The work was collaborative, and the women of the household played a major part in it. One of the harmonies was presented to King Charles I. Writing to one of his nieces, Nicholas described himself not as her master but as a partner and fellow student in the search for wisdom and perfection in Christ.

Little Gidding also became connected with another great Anglican devotional voice. When George Herbert died in 1633, the manuscript of his poems came to Nicholas with permission either to publish or destroy them according to his judgment. Ferrar recognized their worth and helped bring The Temple into print. The poems and the household arose from the same Prayer Book world: disciplined language, sacramental imagination, repentance, and the desire to offer the whole of life to God.

Little Gidding attracted both admiration and suspicion. Some critics mocked the household as a Protestant nunnery because of its fasting and long hours of prayer. The Ferrars continued to follow the Church of England’s Prayer Book, keeping its appointed worship and fasts as a shared rule of life.

Nicholas died at Little Gidding on December 4, 1637. The community continued under other members of the family after his death, though civil war and changing circumstances eventually brought the common life to an end. Its memory survived. When Anglican religious communities revived in the nineteenth century, Little Gidding offered an older example of disciplined common life within the Church of England. In the twentieth century, T. S. Eliot gave the name “Little Gidding” to the final poem of his Four Quartets.

At Little Gidding, the words of the Prayer Book became a pattern of shared hours: worship, meals, study, work, and care for neighbors. Nicholas and his family offered their ordinary days to Christ together. With them, we ask that our prayers might likewise give shape to the way we live and make room for the people who need our care.