{"id":5916,"date":"2013-08-16T16:50:20","date_gmt":"2013-08-16T22:50:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5916"},"modified":"2013-08-16T16:50:20","modified_gmt":"2013-08-16T22:50:20","slug":"on-the-keeping-of-pet-hermits-and-druids","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5916","title":{"rendered":"On the Keeping of Pet Hermits and Druids"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some of the eighteenth-century hermits employed by rich landowners<\/a> were in fact characterized as “Druids.”<\/p>\n

Campbell clearly had fun with his quest for real hermits. At Hawkstone in Shropshire, a bare-footed and venerable Fr Francis regularly posed with his stock-in-trade: a skull, an hourglass and book. Although replaced at times by an automaton, Hawkstone\u2019s hermit \u2013 a hereditary post \u2013 may have survived into the twentieth century. The impecunious Charles Hamilton reputedly advertised for a hermit for his Gothic hermitage at Painshill in Surrey, offering a fee of 700 guineas (some reports say 500) to anyone able and willing to meet his stringent conditions over seven years: to go barefoot in a woollen robe, never to cut beard or nails, or to speak with the servant who brought his food. Although the advertisement cannot now be traced, the hermit undoubtedly existed, and Campbell\u2019s exhaustive enquiries confirm how ubiquitous hermits were in Georgian Britain.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Maybe there is still a niche waiting to be exploited here, for either philosophy majors or designers of animatronic hermits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some of the eighteenth-century hermits employed by rich landowners were in fact characterized as “Druids.” Campbell clearly had fun with his quest for real hermits. At Hawkstone in Shropshire, a bare-footed and venerable Fr Francis regularly posed with his stock-in-trade: a skull, an hourglass and book. Although replaced at times by an automaton, Hawkstone\u2019s hermit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[20,85,21,222,22],"class_list":["post-5916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-archaeology","tag-druids","tag-england","tag-romanticism","tag-weirdness"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-1xq","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1257,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1257","url_meta":{"origin":5916,"position":0},"title":"Blogging Hermits","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 26, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"What is it with blogging hermits\u2014or quasi-hermits?Would Henry David Thoreau have had a blog? I am sure of it. Anyone who would edit his autobiography so that two years of experience fit neatly into one literary year has demonstrated the capability of self-romanticizing that blogging requires.Sunday's Denver Post had a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"blogging\"","block_context":{"text":"blogging","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2640,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2640","url_meta":{"origin":5916,"position":1},"title":"Quick Review: Caesar’s Druids","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 12, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"I am a little more than halfway through Miranda Aldhouse-Green's Caesar's Druids: Story of An Ancient Priesthood. As the British archaeologist Stuart Piggott pointed out back in the 1960s, there are no texts written about Druids by Druids. The sum of what ancient writers of the Greco-Roman world wrote would\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"archaeology\"","block_context":{"text":"archaeology","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=archaeology"},"img":{"alt_text":"Cover image of Casar's Druids by Miranda Aldhouse-Green","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ecx.images-amazon.com\/images\/I\/51AAWVY--yL._AA160_.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5919,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5919","url_meta":{"origin":5916,"position":2},"title":"Druid Sex Magic","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 17, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Many things come to mind when I think of Druids, but sex magic is not one of them. Silly me. I did not know about \"fundamentals of Celtic sex magic,\" etc. Actually, Ronald Hutton was planning to put this in his next book, but now someone has beaten him to\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Druids\"","block_context":{"text":"Druids","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=druids"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":22,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=22","url_meta":{"origin":5916,"position":3},"title":"Druids","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"July 8, 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"I've been working on a section about American Pagan Druids today. First, let me say that I am so glad that I do not have to do anything on British Druids, since in the UK there are two hundred years' worth of self-proclaimed various Druidic groups of all sorts, from\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Druidry\"","block_context":{"text":"Druidry","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=druidry"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3999,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3999","url_meta":{"origin":5916,"position":4},"title":"Ring-Dancing Monkeys and Black Death Rubbish","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 18, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"At Got Medieval, Carl Pyrdrum re-debunks the persistent, authentic-sounding story that the nursery rhyme \"Ring around the Rosies\" has anything whatsoever to do with the Black Death of the 1340s. It does not. As any good English plague survivor********** could tell you, the plague was caused by sin and best\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Druids\"","block_context":{"text":"Druids","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=druids"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6205,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6205","url_meta":{"origin":5916,"position":5},"title":"UK Druids Restore Damaged Ley Lines","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 31, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"A major effort is underway: The council of British Druids have been working through the night to restore ley lines which have been damaged by recent storms. Many households have been without spiritual energy throughout the Yuletide holiday which has affected psychic connections in many parts of the country. A\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Druidry\"","block_context":{"text":"Druidry","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=druidry"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5916"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5916\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5918,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5916\/revisions\/5918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}