Nicholas Ferrar

Nicholas Ferrar , 1592-1637, English theologian. He was associated (1618-23) with the Virginia Company and, with his brother John, played a notable role in its affairs. He retired from Parliament and founded (1625) an austere religious community at Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire; the community consisted of 30 persons engaged in charitable works and intense study of the Scriptures. It was visited and approved (1633) by Charles I, but it was later attacked as an "Arminian nunnery" because of its monastic tendencies and disbanded by Parliament in 1647.

Bibliography: See biography by H. P. Skipton (1907); J. E. Acland, Little Gidding and Its Inmates in the Time of King Charles I (1903); B. Blackstone, ed., The Ferrar Papers (1938); A. M. William, ed., Conversations at Little Gidding (1970).

Ferrar, Nicholas (1592–1637), established in 1625 at Little Gidding, with his brother, his brother-in-law John Collett, and their families, a religious community based on Anglican principles. Ferrar was a close friend of G. Herbert, who on his deathbed entrusted to him the manuscript of his poems contained in The Temple (1633).

Ferrar, Nicholas (1592–1637), founder of Little Gidding. He was elected a Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, was Deputy-Treasurer of the Virginia Company, and was elected a member of Parliament. In 1625 he settled at Little Gidding, where other members of his family joined him to establish a kind of community life in accordance with the principles of the C of E. He was made deacon in 1626. Under his direction the household lived a life of prayer and work under a strict rule. Feast day in CW, 4 Dec.; in the American BCP (1979), 1 Dec.