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Why Brits once hired hermits to live in their gardens

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Here's a job title you won't see on LinkedIn: "ornamental hermit." The position was part of a strange trend that lasted roughly 100 years and saw English landowners hiring people to live in seclusion on their estates, often in the gardens, with byzantine rules governing their behavior.

Wealthy Brits used to hire hermits to live on their estate grounds.

World History

H ere's a job title you won't see on LinkedIn: "ornamental hermit." The position was part of a strange trend that lasted roughly 100 years and saw English landowners hiring people to live in seclusion on their estates, often in the gardens, with byzantine rules governing their behavior. The practice is believed to have emerged around 1727 and ended just over a century later in 1830. Horticultural norms were in flux at the time, and some homeowners rejected the geometric designs of the past in favor of a more wild and natural approach. It would seem that nothing was considered more wild than an actual person, especially one forbidden from speaking, cutting their hair, trimming their nails, or wearing shoes.

Garden hermits were expected to do all this for a period of several months or years, and were generally paid handsomely before returning to the outside world. During their residency, they lived in hermitages, small structures that were as important in form as they were in function: In addition to providing a humble place to live, hermitages were meant to draw one's eye to the landscape. Decorative hermits eventually fell out of fashion, but even today we have something similar adorning our yards: the humble garden gnome.

By the Numbers

Average lifespan (in years) of a wild hermit crab

40

Total compensation listed in an 18th-century ad for a garden hermit

£500–£700

Items in St. Petersburg's State Hermitage Museum

3 million

Age of Lampy, the world's oldest garden gnome

150+

Did you know?

Some garden gnomes have traveled the world.

Despite being stationary objects confined to, well, gardens, some garden gnomes have traveled the world. It's believed that the first person to bring one on a far-flung excursion was Henry Sunderland, who brought a gnome named Charlie with him to the South Pole in 1977 and kicked off a trend that continues to this day. There are now several famous garden gnomes whose owners have documented their travels online, though not all of the ornaments have gone of their own volition. The Gnome Liberation Front is known to "borrow" gnomes from unsuspecting yards and photograph them in new locations, though they do sometimes return them once the fun is over.

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