John Bigg ( 22 April 1629 – 4 April 1696), also known as The Dinton Hermit, was a 17th-century English

hermit A hermit, also known as an eremite (adjectival form: hermitic or eremitic) or solitary, is a person who lives in seclusion. Eremitism plays a role in a variety of religions. Description In Christianity, the term was originally applied to a Ch ...

. Little is known about John Bigg as few people were involved in his life, being that he lived in obscurity. He is recorded as being baptised on 22 April 1629 and a 1712 letter of Thomas Hearne identifies him as the highly educated former clerk of Simon Mayne - a member of the

long parliament The Long Parliament was an English Parliament which lasted from 1640 until 1660. It followed the fiasco of the Short Parliament, which had convened for only three weeks during the spring of 1640 after an 11-year parliamentary absence. In Septem ...

, magistrate, and judge in the trial of King Charles I. Some sources even identify Bigg as a possible candidate for the executioner of Charles. Upon the

restoration of the English monarchy The Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in the kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland took place in 1660 when King Charles II returned from exile in continental Europe. The preceding period of the Protectorate and the civil wars came to be ...

, Bigg's employer, Mayne, was executed for regicide on 13 April 1661. Bigg, either out of fear for his own life or despair at the state of his country, grew reclusive and took to living in a cave in Dinton, Buckinghamshire. Bigg lived on a diet of meat, milk, ale and beer which was supplied to him from unasked charity of local people. He is said to have lived off charity but to only ask for gifts of leather, which he used to patch his boots and clothing, giving him his famous look of a patchwork of leather. His boots, massive with decades of tacked on leather, remain on display at the

Ashmolean Museum The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology () on Beaumont Street, Oxford, England, is Britain's first public museum. Its first building was erected in 1678–1683 to house the cabinet of curiosities that Elias Ashmole gave to the University of ...

in Oxford. Bigg was buried on 4 April 1696, in Dinton.

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