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