It turns out that garden gnomes have a stranger and more disturbing origin than you might have thought.
Before the days of the ceramic lawn gnome, a human being often played the role of the dour, robe-wearing guardian of flora and fauna — and that person was preferably a grizzled old man who didn’t mind living in seclusion and forgoing even basic personal hygiene. Yes, in 19th-century Europe, actual flesh-and-blood humans acted as ornamental garden hermits on the estates of the wealthy.
Additional research traces the garden hermit trend to 18th century England.
The absolute state of Enlightenment-era Anglos.
Two trends in Georgian England created a moment in history ripe for the phenomenon of ornamental hermitage: solitude and overt displays of material wealth.
Wealthy landowners desired expansive and often ornate gardens on their property, and would use these expanses to reflect not just financial riches, but existing social mores such as melancholy.
Elite circles viewed this deeper, more introspective form of sadness as a mark of intelligence, and thus sought to associate themselves with the sentiment whenever possible. Physical property presented an easy, obvious avenue to bring this social virtue of melancholy to life.
How did one obtain a garden hermit? By placing newspaper ads, of course.
The following is representative of employment terms featured in garden hermit want ads:
…he shall be provided with a Bible, optical glasses, a mat for his feet, a hassock for his pillow, an hourglass for timepiece, water for his beverage, and food from the house. He must wear a camlet robe, and never, under any circumstances, must he cut his hair, beard, or nails, stray beyond the limits of Mr. Hamilton’s grounds, or exchange one word with the servant.
What did garden hermits do, though? Here’s an example from the period of how interactions with a garden hermit went:
“You pull a bell, and gain admittance. The hermit is generally in a sitting posture, with a table before him, on which is a skull, the emblem of mortality, an hour-glass, a book and a pair of spectacles. The venerable bare-footed Father, whose name is Francis (if awake) always rises up at the approach of strangers. He seems about 90 years of age, yet has all his sense to admiration. He is tolerably conversant, and far from being unpolite.”
As you might expect, the garden hermit trend was short-lived.
Recruiting a garden hermit isn’t easy – at least a reliable one. The Honorable Charles Hamilton after acquiring Painshill Park, an estate in Cobham, Surrey, hired a hermit to live there for 7 years. The hermit was not allowed to leave the estate, speak with anyone, or cut his hair. This is in exchange for 700 pounds which is $77,000 in today’s money. Unfortunately, the hired hermit was seen in a local pub just three weeks after getting hired.
The difficulty of finding good hermit help led country gentlemen to replace their ornamental men with mannequins, which morphed into today’s ceramic gnomes.
So the next time you see a garden gnome, remember that they’re artifacts from the same bored, rich British housewives responsible for socialism.
18th century England was a mistake.
For more strange tales, read my fan favorite short story collection Strange Matter
I recently picked up Joseph Pearce’s new Faith of Our Fathers, a history of Catholic England, and I’m going to have to see if the ornamental hermit trend might be a foolish attempt to recapture some of what was lost during the Henrician and Elizabethan Devastations.
It’s thought that 15h century Italian mendicant Francis of Paola was the first garden hermit.
Interesting. So much for the post-Reformation theory. But the English have had a certain love/hate relationship with Italian religious practices and figures for centuries.
Shakespeare would feature monks and priests as sympathetic figures, which is often cited as evidence of his Catholicism.
Yeah, Joseph Pearce is a big believer as the Shakespeare as proto-Catholic theory, and interprets all of his work in that way.
Personally I don’t see it. It strikes me as just as forced an interpretation as the idea that Romeo and Juliet is in fact Anglican propaganda against a celibate Priesthood.
Could the story be read that way? Maybe – if you were already looking for it in advance. Same to me as the Shakemeister’s supposed Catholicism. There’s just nothing concrete there. And it leads to what I think are absurd interpretations, like Shylock from “The Merchant of Venice” representing a Puritan, which I was actually convinced about until I looked into the subject more in depth. There was just nothing there, and one would only interpret it that way if one was already committed to the theory Shakespeare was a secret Catholic out to make literally every vaguely negative character in his works a thinly veiled Puritan.
I find that he bought a house–known to be used for hidden Masses, confiscated from the previous owner for being used to hide priests, with known priest holes–and handed it over for the use to people who were later found (and I believe either martyred or chased out of the country) to be using it as a place to hide priests more substantial circumstantial evidence.
It’s still VERY circumstantial. Every concrete fact we had points to the bard being a committed Anglican.
Matthew
Read that in conjunction with Stripping of the altars.
I’d argue the Reformation was a catastrophe. The British one broke the gates and let all the proto fire and brimstone preachers, tee totaleers, puritans into society. And since then the world has had to suffer from Anglosphere moral panic and ideological fads.
xavier
The Reformation is the beginning of “Modernity”, even though it’s often overlooked as such. Without Protestantism, you don’t have the primacy of individual conscience, so no liberalism (if the conscience is sovereign enough to make the most important decision possible, how can it be subject to anything in lesser matters?). Without the 30 Years War, you don’t have Westphalia and the ensuing fatigue and horror towards religious war, hence no belief in the need to remove the Church from public power or have religious subjectivism. This is why I think an alternate history about the Reformation never happening is one of the most impactful and interesting possible, yet it seems remarkably unpopular as a subject.
It’s unpopular because almost everyone – even most Christians – is so mired in Modernism as to be incapable of imagining how history could have proceeded without it.
There was one such alternate-history world in a book called ‘Pavane’. I can’t remember who wrote it, it’s 2 continents and an equator away, my old dad bought it in the 60s.
The alternative, all-Catholic world in the 1960s had steam engines but no cars, only primitive typewriters and we still used flintlock muskets (for some reason!). Every profession had guilds with military-style grades (literal ‘Captains of Industry’).
The main idea of the book was that the horrors of WWI had never happened, and (of course, for the time) there was no threat of a nuclear holocaust.
The catalyst for the alternative history was that Elizabeth I had been assassinated early in her reign, by someone with an early musket. Personally, I would have had someone assassinate king Gustav of Sweden (the one who conquered Poland, stopping the Lutherans from losing the 30 yrs war).
Eoin,
The closest we can imagine of the Reformation never happening would be Latin America under the Portuguese and Spanish empires
xavier
The perfect expression for this era would be for this fad to pick up again, except with billionaires hiring people to play as superhero movie characters rather than as saintly hermits.
It wouldn’t make sense for them to live in the gardens, however.
I once told Brian about how VR could be used to create a 1:1 replica of a place like Wakanda. Perhaps a billionaire could commission a map* of Wakanda for something like VR Chat, paywall it, then hire an entire cast of roleplayers to populate it–full time, if he feels sadistic enough. He could even create little pods for the roleplayers to inhabit that would allow them to eat, sleep, and possibly exercise without removing their headsets.
*In 3D games and simulations, levels are typically referred to as “maps.”
Don’t give them any ideas! They are crazy enough to try them!
I believe they’re called cosplayers.