'Voluntary Anglicanism': The Contribution of Little Gidding

The English Reformation, historians now generally agree, was a lengthy process, a winding path, that by the beginning of the eighteenth century had transformed the Church of England from an inclusive national church whose 'communities' were territorially defined parishes to which all inhabitants were deemed automatically to belong, to one that, though still parochial and privileged, was compelled to co-exist with 'communities' that were voluntary societies brought together by shared convictions and religious experiences that transcended parochial boundaries. These changed circumstances affected not only those dissenting from the established church but those remaining within it, who found themselves perforce becoming, however reluctantly, what Mark Goldie has called 'voluntary Anglicans'.1Among the many elements contributing to the growth after the Restoration of voluntary societies within the Church of England was one that has thus far received little attention, namely the web of memories and friendship that linked a small but influential group of friends and kinsfolk of Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding, a network Ferrar himself had called a 'Web of Friendship'.2 Members of this group who had known Ferrar and the Gidding household preserved both their individual memories and their contacts with each other, contacts that, after the Restoration, they proceeded to develop and expand. Out of these circles of friends and family came, on the one hand, Francis Turner's biography of Ferrar and on the other memories of Little Gidding as a 'religious society'. The biography and its supporting materials preserved a detailed record of the household's collective life and its leader's exemplary piety. Though not published, it circulated in manuscript, particularly, after 1689, among Nonjurors, several of whom copied extracts of it which have survived where the complete biography has perished.3 Those who remembered Little Gidding as a 'religious society' were incorporating into its piety the voluntarism with which Ferrar drew together Little Gidding as a community. This expanding circle eventually brought together a diverse group of Anglicans both clerical and lay that included Nonjurors like Thomas Ken and Robert Nelson as well as those like Edward Fowler and John Mapletoft who were prepared to reach out to Nonconformists. These men shared a concern for the social and spiritual evils they saw about them and addressed these evils by organizing themselves, first as 'Religious Societies' dedicated to promoting piety, then after 1689 as societies for reforming manners, promoting Christian knowledge, and propagating the gospel in foreign parts.How much influence the example of Little Gidding had on the members of these voluntary societies is impossible to ascertain with certainty. It remains largely in the realm of the possible and probable; surviving sources provide no explicit comments to confirm that influence. Nevertheless a reconstruction of the networks that connected such men to each other and provided contacts through which information about Gidding could flow suggests a significant link between the voluntarism of Little Gidding and these later developments among 'voluntary Anglicans'. Indeed the lasting significance of Little Gidding lies more in the survival and ongoing influence of its remembered example than in any immediate influence it exerted in the Church of England of Ferrar's day.There had been an element of voluntarism at Little Gidding from the outset in the choice the several family members had made in 1625-6 to participate in this new way of life.4 After 1630, as if glimpsing new possibilities for his disciplined household, Ferrar began to introduce new activities into the pattern of work, worship and education he had established at the beginning of the family's life at Little Gidding. In this effort he enjoyed the encouragement, indeed the collaboration, of George Herbert. The success of this ambitious enlargement of the group's purpose depended, Ferrar realised, on a participation in the new activities that was explicitly voluntary and that in effect created little societies within the larger household community. …