Ransome 2011

Ransome, Joyce. The Web of Friendship: Nicholas Ferrar and Little Gidding. Cambridge: James Clark & Co., 2011.

"The Ferrars were a musical family and as members of the household gathered round their mistress, she led them in singing psalms together as they worked. She also heard her children read aloud from the Bible and also from Foxe's Actes and Monuments and other worthy volumes." (27)

while Ferrar was in Europe:

• he visited churchs and "set about collecting examples of divine providence and miracles, evidence of God's active intervention in His creation, the sorts of stories he subsequently collected for his family to use" (33)
• no mention of him buying books or prints, though that is often repeated in his biographies (34)
• in Leipzig, acquired the skill of 'artificial memory' (35)
• evidence he "knew of at least some of the charitable Italian institutions created to care for and to educate children. One of the works he had by 1634 translated but was refused permission to publish was Ludovico Carbone's Dello Ammaestramento de' Figliuoli nella Dottrina Christiana, which Ferrar rendered as 'Of the Christian Education of children'." (39)

at Little Gidding, "tenants delivered provisions (eggs, butter, cheese, meat and bread) but the nieces supervised the dairy and the cows that provided the family's milk as well as the baking of the special manchet breat. This arrangement not only trained the nieces but relieved their mother and grandmother of these tasks. The nieces were also skilled needlewomen and dispensed medical ministrations to the local villagers."

the estate yielded an annual income of between 400 and 500

"As the many conduct manuals of the period made plain, a household needed the skills of both a man and a woman for its smooth functioning. Little Gidding had such a partnership but in the unconventional form of a widowed mother and her unmarried son." (51)

royal opposition to private chapels became clear in 1629; Ferrar tried to counter the appearance that the Little Gidding chapel (a parish church, with the entire parish as the household) was private (64)

"Reading, as would be appropriate for a household that was a 'school of religion', featured prominently in many of its shared activities. How much of that reading was done by individuals in private is unclear from the accounts that survive. Ferrar himself obviously devoted much of his time when hew as at Gidding to study and probably encouraged at least his namesake nephew, whom he educated wholly at home, to do the same. For the most part, however, reading seems to have been very much as a social as well as an educational activity and one fundamental to Ferrar's method of interactive instruction for all ages." (65)

children read stories during meals; those stories were then abstracted by an adult and transcribed by the children into a book; the children were quizzed on the stories; at each main meal children recited stories from memory (65)

"The women of the family would also have had opportunity during the day for similar consultation and indeed might have read to one another as they sat together in the Great Chamber around old Mary Ferrar. Certainly the social ambience for reading and family devotions for which John Rastrick later yearned was very much present at Little Gidding." (65)