Community of the Holy Family

The order of nuns, founded in the Church of England in 1896, has been refounded and is active in the United States in the independent sacramental movement.

Three of the four original members, who were admitted as novices in August 1896, were graduates of Newnham College, Cambridge; one of these was Agnes Mason, the Mother Foundress.

[4] From 1937,[5] a daughter house was located at Peakirk, near Peterborough, attached to the ancient hermitage of St Pega, for those Sisters wishing to follow a more contemplative form of the religious life, although the Order's principal charism was of outreach, not enclosure.

In January 1997 the remaining three sisters moved to Malling Abbey in Kent to live in the gatehouse alongside the resident Benedictine community.

[6] Sister Julia Bolton Holloway, educated by the nuns of the Community, with a doctorate in Medieval Studies from Berkeley, joined them for their final four years at Holmhurst St Mary, and following the closure of the Order she continues the ethos of the Mother Foundress for education and ecumenism, as a solitary hermit in Florence, Italy, where she is custodian of the English Cemetery, Florence.