Little Gidding and Nicholas Ferrar

a talk and poetry reading at Little Gidding: July 2005

On a lovely day in May 1936 the poet T S Eliot came here to Little Gidding. He would have come no doubt from the A1 and across some of the same country lanes as we have travelled. He had been asked to look at a play about the visit of King Charles I to Little Gidding. He would have turned down this narrow lane and stopped here. This was a farmhouse and he would have stood here in the farmyard. Over there were the pig-sties, and just around the corner is the façade of a little church, and in front of it a tombstone.

So why did Eliot come here? What did he expect to find? This, he says, is a holy place, a place where prayer has been valid.

Let’s walk round towards the church. We’ll gather just outside …

This is the ‘dull façade / And the tombstone’ that Eliot mentions. It’s the tomb of Nicholas Ferrar.

Nicholas Ferrar was born on 22 February 1592 – George Herbert, remember, was born in 1593, so they were almost exact contemporaries. His father was also called Nicholas Ferrar; he was a merchant in London of considerable wealth and standing. He had married Mary Woodnoth and they had seven children. Nicholas was the fourth.

When he was 13, young Nicholas was sent from school to Cambridge, to study at Clare Hall, now Clare College. He studied medicine, or ‘physic’ as it was called, and after taking his degree became a junior fellow at Clare. Despite his family wealth he lived a devout and ascetic life, but the damp Cambridge air disagreed with him, and he was advised to leave to improve his health.

So at the age of 20 he went abroad as a courtier. He found that court life was not for him, and so he embarked on a five-year continental tour. His aim was to improve his mind and he studied at the medical schools in Leipzig and in Padua. Not surprisingly he studied languages, and he was also interested in the religious debates which were taking place in Europe at the time. He saw at first hand the attempts at religious life which had been begun by Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, by Philip Neri, who founded the Oratorians, and by Vincent de Paul, founder of the Sisters of Charity. He also met Anabaptists and Arminians in Holland and Lutherans in Germany. And all this time he continued his ascetic life – of dying to self.

In 1618 he returned to England. His father and others were members of the Virginia Company, which promoted trade and the colonization of America. This angered the government of Spain – they wanted to control the whole of America – and the Spanish ambassador petitioned the king to suppress the Virginia Company. It fell to Nicholas Ferrar to defend the Company at the Privy Council, but despite his efforts the Company lost its Royal Charter. Ferrar was now elected an MP for Lymington and served for several years. He was offered the positions of Ambassador to Savoy and of Clerk to the Privy Council.

Let’s go inside the church …

At the age of 30, Nicholas Ferrar, scholar, courtier, merchant and politician, abandoned the pursuit of worldly advancement to take up a life of religious retirement, devotion and mysticism. It was 1624.

His first thought was to travel to Virginia as a missionary to the American Indians. But instead he chose an alternative and with the support of his mother and other members of the family decided to live as a family community in ‘as strict a way according to the gospel of Christ’.

In 1624 the family purchased the manor house here at Little Gidding. The village had been deserted, perhaps since the population had been destroyed in the Black Death some two hundred years earlier. The house was probably on the site of the nineteenth-century house we have just walked past. It was a tranquil spot, not too far from the Great North Road, but none of it was in good repair.

The little church had been converted into a barn and at Mary Ferrar’s insistence the first task was to make it fit for worship. They pretty much rebuilt the church on the same site, although the older church was somewhat larger. The new church was large enough for their own needs. There was just a nave and chancel, and it is the chancel that dates from around 1625. They installed panelling and seating, with the walls lined with stalls, just as these are. The nave was rebuilt again, later. They provided, too, the eagle lectern, made in about 1500, probably in Norwich. The brass font is now kept in the house to prevent its deterioration.

Anyway, by Easter 1626 they returned to London to sell up, and it was there that Nicholas Ferrar was ordained Deacon by Bishop Laud in Westminster Abbey. As a man of the cloth Ferrar was now debarred from secular employment, but he also gained the sanction of the Church to exercise spiritual authority over his family.

He read to his family a solemn vow to devote himself to God’s service as an act of thanksgiving for his preservation in so many dangers of soul and body and the deliverance of his family from the brink of ruin.

So the Ferrar family began their communal life. Nicholas Ferrar and his mother were joined by his brother John and his sister Susannah, each bringing their families. John came with his wife Bathsheba, and although John was keen to share his brother’s vision, and eventually became the head of the community after Nicholas’s death, Bathsheba does not seem to have appreciated the move from London to the backwoods of Huntingdonshire. She complained about the coldness of the house, she complained about the early hour at which everyone rose, she hated the pious way of life and frequently displayed a fiery temper. It’s hard not to be at least a little sympathetic!

Nicholas’s sister Susannah was married to John Collet. They had previously lived at Bourn, and had eight sons and eight daughters. The eldest two daughters, Mary and Ann, resolved to remain unmarried in order to devote themselves to the life of the community and service to God. This smacked of popery and of the convent, and although the young women expressed their intentions formally in front of the Bishop of Lincoln, they did not take vows, as nuns would. This life of a Christian family, with no vows, may have been influenced by the teaching of Philip Neri, which Nicholas would have seen on his continental travels.

In all there were about thirty people with a small school for their own and other children, an almshouse for the local elderly, and a dispensary for the sick – Nicholas, remember, had been a medical student.

Every day the household would rise at 4am – 5 in the winter – and assemble in a room in the house to listen to scripture and to sing hymns. At 6.30 they processed here to say Morning Prayer, returning at 10am for the Litany, and again at 4pm for Evening Prayer, all according to the forms in the Book of Common Prayer.

Every hour between, prayers were said in the house. Old Mrs Ferrar went to all the services, and the others attended as they were able.

Later, at George Herbert’s suggestion, a night watch was kept from 9pm till 1am at which the psalms were recited. Between the various services, the entire psalter, all 150 psalms, was recited twice a day.

On Sundays the Vicar of Steeple Gidding would come over to say Morning Prayer, and on the first Sunday in the month he would administer Communion. On Sunday afternoons the household would walk over to Steeple Gidding for Evensong.

This then was a pretty rigorous round of prayer – the traditional monastic life adapted for a seventeenth-century household in protestant England.

The Community engaged in much discussion, and they were also responsible for a number of ‘Bible Harmonies’. The most typical was a gospel harmony, in which the narratives of each of the four gospels were brought together into a single continuous narrative. They would cut up a printed bible and paste the parallel passages into a new book which was decorated with engravings and handsomely bound.

The Community also attracted attention, though they did not look for it. Neighbouring squires sent their sons to be educated, clergy came on retreat from near and far, and people came, curious to see this so-called Protestant Nunnery. The Bishop of Lincoln, living frequently at Buckden just down the road, would ride over to engage in discussion or prayer. On one occasion he held a confirmation, and the choir of Peterborough Cathedral was brought over to assist in the service!

In May 1633, King Charles I, on his way to Scotland, stopped at Little Gidding. The whole family went out to meet him. He borrowed one of their Gospel Harmonies, returning it with his own notes in the margins, and suggesting that they produce another harmony, of the books of Kings and Chronicles.

In 1637 Nicholas’s old illness, the ague or malaria, which had earlier caused him to leave Cambridge for the continent, returned, and on 4 December he died. He was 44. He was buried outside the west end of this church.

The community continued after his death, with his brother John at its head. Now, however, the times were growing more troubled. Bishop Williams, the Bishop of Lincoln, advised them to be careful, and not to show any semblance of popery. Scurrilous pamphlets began to appear, the most infamous being entitled The Arminian Nunnery, describing the community as a ‘bridge to popery’ and calling for the archbishops, bishops, and parliament to suppress it.

In 1642 the king visited again, this time with the Prince of Wales and Prince Rupert, and donated to the community five pounds which he had won from the princes at cards the previous night. When the community prayed God to bless and defend him he exclaimed, ‘Pray, pray for my safe and speedy return.’

But these were troubled times. Archbishop Laud, and another of the king’s advisers, Strafford, went to their deaths on the scaffold, and the third, the king himself, would follow.

King Charles was indeed to return here once more, in May 1646. Now, though, he was fleeing from defeat at the Battle of Naseby. The Civil War was lost and he came at night, ‘a broken king’ (as Eliot writes). John Ferrar, loyal and discreet, hid him nearby at Coppingford for two days and then got him away to Stamford.

Now the Community was in trouble and it was raided by Puritan soldiers. They destroyed the hated organ and ransacked the house, destroying Nicholas Ferrar’s books and manuscripts. The family returned after a few months and lived there for ten more years through the presbyterian republican Commonwealth and the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. In 1657, John Ferrar died. At once, his widow Bathsheba, freed at last from her vow to obey her husband, left Little Gidding and returned to London. A month later John’s sister Susannah also died. Each was buried near their brother Nicholas outside the church. The plates which marked their gravestones were later removed to the church for safe-keeping, and we can see them either side of the chancel.

This was the end of the community.

Although the community was no more, the Ferrar family continued to be the Lords of the Manor. In 1714, John and Bathsheba’s son, also called John, restored the nave again, shortening it by several feet and building the rather odd façade that we see today. It was then that these stalls were inserted – but the style of them must have been very old-fashioned in 1714, and it is quite possible that they were adapted from the stalls that were put in by Nicholas in 1625.

Eventually the Ferrar family lost interest in Little Gidding and they sold the manor. In 1848 it was bought at auction by a solicitor from Stamford called William Hopkinson. He built himself a new house to replace the old manor house which had been destroyed by fire and undertook a thorough restoration of the little church. The stalls were altered again, with the addition of proper seats at a uniform level – the panelling was raised in height at this time. He inserted a new window at the east end, a large round-arched window with a coloured image of the Crucifixion, and he also put in these four armorial windows, showing the shields of Nicholas Ferrar (note the horseshoes, a pun on ‘farrier’ for Ferrar), of John Williams (the Bishop of Lincoln), of Charles I, and of himself. He added the candelabrum, which may have been removed from Uppingham church when it was restored. Hopkinson was himself buried at Little Gidding, near to the grave of Nicholas Ferrar.

Nicholas Ferrar’s reputation continued to rise. His was the only attempt at a religious community in England from the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII until the revival of monasticism under the influence of the Oxford Movement in the late nineteenth century.

In the twentieth century the poet T S Eliot, a convert to the Church of England, found inspiration in this place and in the community which had lived here. His great poem, written during the war after his visit in 1936, and published in 1942, explores the importance of time and the intersection with timeless moments that can come at places like Little Gidding.

Inspired by the example of Nicholas Ferrar, and by the poetry of Eliot, the Friends of Little Gidding were formed in 1946. The Bishop of Ely was President, and Eliot a vice-president. The Friends organized pilgrimages and gradually were able to take on a ministry of hospitality to visitors and to support the maintenance of the fabric of the Church. Now once again, Ferrar House is able to offer that hospitality, so ‘let us go then, you and I’ … and have some tea.

Simon Kershaw
July 2005

Copyright © Simon Kershaw 2005. All rights reserved.

Extracts from Little Gidding by T S Eliot copyright the Estate of T S Eliot 1942. The text of the poem is omitted from this web version for copyright reasons.