Nicholas Ferrar

Anglican clergyman and spiritual mystic, born in London, UK. After studying medicine, and a brief period in politics, he became a deacon in the Church of England (1626). At Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire he founded a small religious community which engaged in constant services and perpetual prayer, while carrying out a range of crafts, such as bookbinding. It was broken up by the Puritans in 1647.

Nicholas Ferrar (1592-1637) came from a family deeply involved in the London Virginia Company. They were part of the parliamentary faction (the "country party" or "patriot party") which was able to seize control of the finances from a rival group, the "court faction", grouped around Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick on the one hand and Sir Thomas Smith (or Smythe), also a prominent member of the East India Company.

Ferrar's pamphlet Sir Thomas Smith's Misgovernance of the Virginia Company was only published by the Roxborough Club in 1990.

The argument ended with the London Virginia Company losing its charter following a court decision in May, 1624.

In 1626 Nicholas Ferrar became involved in setting up a religious community in Little Gidding, Huntingdonshire. With John Collett and his family they used an abandoned old church to set up the Community of Christ the Sower. The community always had someone at prayer and had a strict religious routine. They tended to the health and education of local children, and Nicholas and his family continued to produce harmonies of the gospels that survive today as some of the finest in Britain. The current Community of Christ the Sower is an Anglican third order based in the United States. Nicholas Ferrar's feast day in the English Prayer book is celebrated on December fourth, and in America on December first.

King Charles I took refuge at Little Gidding after the Battle of Naseby (1645). Eliot honoured Nicholas Ferrar in the Four Quartets, naming one of the quartets "Little Gidding".