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Professor Gordon Campbell explains the 18th-century craze for ornamental hermits in the garden that still lives on today in the form of the garden gnome. Campbell traces the hermit’s origins to the villa of Roman emperor Hadrian in the second century AD. But it was in 18th-century Georgian England that the ornamental hermit enjoyed its heyday as many landowners constructed fashionable follies with hermitages. The hermitages were populated with imaginary hermits and, in some cases, with real ones. The fashion died out at the end of the 18th century but Campbell explains how the ornamental hermit lives on in art, literature and drama and in today’s garden gnome.

Campbell is professor of Renaissance studies at the University of Leicester and author of the bestselling Bible: The Story of the King James Bible.