Mary Ferrar

[3] With him she had six children: According to the biography of Nicholas Ferrar in 1631 Mary was "a tall, straight, deep complexioned, grave matron, of eighty years of age".

[5] In 1620 Esmé Stewart, the Earl of March (1579–1624) and Lord Lieutenant of Huntingdonshire (later, briefly, the 3rd Duke of Lennox), sold the manor of Little Gidding to Thomas Sheppard.

The popular wisdom of the time was that it took a man and a woman to successfully run a household in the persons of a husband and wife, and while it was not unusual for women to be the head of a family or to own property in the 17th-century, the situation at Little Gidding was rather more unconventional as not only did the widowed Mary Ferrar share responsibility for the community with her unmarried son but two other adult males (and their families) also submitted to her authority in the persons of her son John Ferrar and son-in-law John Collet.

[1] Between 1625 and 1629 Nicholas Ferrar spent much of his time in London and in 1626 he was ordained as a Deacon by William Laud (1573–1645) then Bishop of St David's and later Archbishop of Canterbury.

When they purchased it, the property consisted of a decayed manor house and the village's medieval parish church of St John which had not been worshipped in for 60 years.

[8] The Ferrars began repairing the site, with Mary's first priority being the church, which had been desecrated through use as a barn and which was so full of hay that at first she was unable to enter to pray.

A family friend was to write to her nephew Arthur Wodenoth that he recalled Mary Ferrar as "one who brought a new Religion into the world.