It must have been a comfortable state of society when two angry ladies could exclaim to each other, “You may say of me what you please; you may charge me with breaking the seventh commandment; but, thank Heaven and Cyprian, you cannot accuse me of wearing a wig!”
No pains were spared to deter women from this enormity. St. Jerome holds up the fate of Prætexta as a warning to all ladies addicted to the fashion of the world. Prætexta was a very respectable lady, married to a somewhat paganish husband, Hymetius. Their niece, Eustochia, resided with them. At the instigation of the husband, Prætexta took the shy Eustochia in hand, attired her in a splendid dress, and covered her fair neck with ringlets. Having enjoyed the sight of the modest maiden so attired, Prætexta went to bed. To that bedside immediately descended an angel, with wrath upon his brow, and billows of angry sounds rolling from his lips. “Thou hast,” said the spirit, “obeyed thy husband rather than the Lord, and hast dared to deck the hair of a virgin, and made her look like a daughter of earth. For this do I wither up thy hands, and bid them recognize the enormity of thy crime in the amount of thy anguish and bodily suffering. Five months more shalt thou live, and then Hell shall be thy portion; and if thou art bold enough to touch the head of Eustochia again, thy husband and thy children shall die even before thee.”
St. Jerome pledges himself for the truth of this story, which is exceedingly perplexing and utterly unintelligible.
The ladies were more difficult of management than the clergy. The former were not to be terrified by the assurance, that breaking an ordinance of men was a worse crime than breaking one of the commandments of God. The hair of the clergy was kept straight, by decree of forfeiture of revenues or benefice against incumbents who approached the altars with curls even of their natural hair. Pomades and scented waters were denounced as damnable inventions; but anathema was uttered against the priest guilty of wearing one single hair combed up above its fellows. The well-curled Bishop of Oxford would have been in the olden time ipso facto, because of being so curled, excommunicated,—according to the decree of the Council of Lateran (Gregory II.), which says:—“Cuicumque ex clericis comam relaxaverit, anathema sit!”
“All personal disguise,” says Tertullian, “is adultery before God. All perukes, paint, and powder are such disguises, and inventions of the devil;” ergo, etc. This zealous individual appeals to personal as often as to religious feeling. “If you will not fling away your false hair,” says he, “as hateful to Heaven, cannot I make it hateful to yourselves, by reminding you that the false hair you wear may have come not only from a criminal but from a very dirty head, perhaps from the head of one already damned?”
This was a very hard hit indeed; but it was not nearly so clever a stroke at wigs as that dealt by Clemens of Alexandria. The latter informed the astounded wig-wearers that, when they knelt at church to receive the blessing, they must be good enough to recollect that the benediction remained on the wig, and did not pass through to the wearer! This was a stumbling-block to the people; many of whom however retained the peruke, and took their chance as to the percolating through it of the benediction.
On similarly obstinate people, Tertullian railed with a hasty charge of ill-prepared logic. “You were not born with wigs,” said he; “God did not give them to you. God not giving them, you must necessarily have received them from the devil.” It was manifest that so rickety a syllogism was incapable of shaking the lightest scratch from a reasoning Christian’s skull. Indeed the logic of Tertullian, when levied against wigs, is exceedingly faulty. Men of the world he points out as being given to over-scrupulous cleanliness. Your saint is dirty from an impulse of duty; were he otherwise, he might be too seductive to the weaker sex. This reminds me of the monk of Prague who was blind, but he had so fine a nose that he was able to distinguish between a saint and a sinner by the smell!
Not only were the Scriptures pressed into service against those who wore false hair or dyed their own, but zealous Christian priests quoted even heathen writers to shame men out of the custom. It is a remarkable thing how well acquainted these well-meaning, but somewhat over-straining, personages were with the erotic poets of heathendom.
Before the period of the Conquest, ecclesiastics were hardly distinguishable from the laity except by the tonsure; and of this they seem to have been partly ashamed, for they concealed it, to the best of their ability, by brushing the long hair around it, so as to cover the distinctive mark. It was only the great dignitaries who wore beards: had a poor priest ventured to carry one on his face, he would have had the one pulled and the other slapped by his ecclesiastical superiors. The inferior clergy cared nothing about the matter till beards were interdicted, as far as they were concerned; and when the Council of Limoges, in 1031, decreed that the wearing of the beard was to be entirely optional, all concerned lost all concern in the question. Desire had only fastened itself upon what was forbidden. As for the more dignified clergy of the period, they were the most splendid dressers of the day; and the greatest “dandies” were those who officiated at the altar. No censure directed against their extravagance in this respect had any effect upon them. It was only when the reproof seemingly came from Heaven that they cared for it; as in the case of the young soldier in the army of Stephen, who was intensely vain of the locks which fell from his crown to his knees, and which he suddenly cut off close to the roots, in consequence of dreaming that the devil was strangling him with his own luxuriant ringlets. The dream did not cure other fops. In the days of King John, our excellent fathers actually curled their hair with crisping irons, and bound their locks with fillets, like girls. They went bareheaded lest the beauty of their curls should be disturbed by a cap; and they were not at all the sort of men that we should suspect of having wrung Magna Charta from the King;—that Magna Charta the original copy of which once fell into the hands of a tailor, who was cutting it up into other measures for men, when it was rescued, not without difficulty, and consigned to its present safe custody in the British Museum.
English ladies (despite the fact that English lords cherished wigs even in the days of Stephen) do not appear to have adopted the fashion of wearing wigs until about the year 1550. Junius, in his ‘Commentarium de Comâ,’ says that false hair came into use here with the ladies about that time, and that such use had never before been adopted by English matrons. Some three hundred years before this, the Benedictine monks at Canterbury, who were canons of the cathedral, very pathetically represented to Pope Innocent IV. that they were subject to catch very bad colds from serving in the wide and chilly cathedral bareheaded. The Pontiff gave them solemn permission to guard against cathedral rheum, bronchitis, and phthisis, by covering their heads with the hood common to their order; bidding them have especial care however to fling back the hood at the reading of the Gospel, and at the elevation of the host. Zealous churchmen have been very indignant at the attempts made to prove that the permission of Innocent IV. might be construed as a concession to priests, allowing them to wear wigs if they were so minded. The question was settled at the Great Council of England, held in London in 1268. That Council refused to sanction the wearing by clerics of “quas vulgo coifas vocant,” except when they were travelling. If a coif even was profane, a wig to this Council would have taken the guise of the unpardonable sin. It is, however, well known that although Rome forbade a priest to officiate with covered head, permission to do so was purchaseable. In fact, the rule of Rome was not founded, as it was asserted to be, on Scripture. Permission was readily granted to the Romish priests in China to officiate with covered heads, as being more agreeable to the native idea there of what was seemly.