Today the Primitive Catholic Community commemorates Nicholas Ferrar and his companions, who brought family-based religious life to the English Church in the seventeenth century.
Born in London in 1592,
Nicholas Ferrar was educated at Clare Hall, Cambridge and elected a Fellow
there in 1610. From 1613, he travelled extensively on the continent for five
years, trying his hand as a businessman and then as a parliamentarian on his
return.
In 1625, he moved to Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire, then a derelict
manor-house with a chapel which was being used as a hay barn. He was joined by
his brother and sister and their families and by his mother, and they
established together a community life of prayer, using The Book of Common Prayer, and a life of charitable works in the
locality. He was ordained to the diaconate the year after they arrived.
He
wrote to his niece in 1631, "I purpose and hope by God's grace to be to
you not as a master but as a partner and fellow student." This indicates
the depth and feeling of the community life Nicholas and his family strove to
maintain.
As a part of the Community’s discipline of prayer, a member of the
community was constantly present before the Altar in prayer, that the community
might truly ‘pray without ceasing’.
After the death of
Nicholas on this day in 1637, the community was broken up in 1646 by the
Puritans, who were suspicious of it and referred to it as the Arminian Nunnery.
They feared it promoting the return of Romish practices into England, and so
all Nicholas's manuscripts were burned.
