BEARDS, WIGS, AND HISTORY
The trouble with hair is that it persists in growing, and every once in a while something must be done about it. Over the millenia since time began—or at least since people began—that “something” has been manifold in variety: dyeing, bleaching, oiling, powdering, pomading, trimming, curling, straightening, shaving off completely, or augmenting with hair from horses, cows, goats, and from other human heads.
Shaving the face was not customary among the ancient Greeks until Alexander the Great ordered his soldiers to doff their beards lest the enemy use them as a convenient handle in close combat. Thereupon the Grecian tonsorial parlor, known as a tonstrina, added shaving to its previous services of trimming and dressing the hair and beard, massage, first aid, and minor surgery.
Roman barbers (the word comes from the Latin barba for beard) followed the example of their Greek colleagues when the beard passed out of favor during the Republic. The classic reply of the Roman general Archelaus rings true even today: asked by a talkative barber how he would like to be trimmed, Archelaus answered, according to Plutarch, “In silence.”
From the onslaught of the barbarians (a word that comes not from barba, but from the Greek barbaros, meaning strange or rude) until about the thirteenth century, the craft of barbering probably reverted in most of Europe to its elementary procedures of trimming and dressing the hair and beard. In the latter century the first guilds of barbers were formed in both France and England, and by the seventeenth century the golden age of the barber had begun.
For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe an inordinate emphasis on appearance led to excesses of fashion in both costume and hairdress. Men followed the vagaries of high fashion as faithfully as women, and vied with each other in wearing long curls of their own or somebody else’s hair.
The wearing of wigs, at least for special purposes, was of ancient origin. Wigs have been found on Egyptian mummies; Greek actors wore wigs on stage; fashionable ladies of Rome and Carthage were much addicted to false hair—especially golden locks from Teuton heads. But the widespread wearing of perukes as an everyday article of costume is generally held to date from 1624, when Louis XIII adopted the usage.
Here it needs to be said, perhaps, that “wig” and “peruke” are not different styles but different forms of the same word. The French perruque, spelled peruke in England and the colonies, had gone through an earlier series of English transformations: from perwyke to perewyk to periwig, and then by abbreviation to wig.
Although Louis XIV disdained wigs until his abundant natural hair began to fall out, the fashion flourished at his court and was brought over to England by the restored Charles II, who began in 1663 to affect a large black wig. Charles may have been the first English king to adopt the custom, but it is said that Elizabeth I owned some 80 auburn, orange, and gold wigs to cover her thinning hair.
Just as Louis XIII’s courtiers hastened to don wigs as soon as their monarch did, so aspiring ladies and gentlemen of Restoration England emulated their king. Samuel Pepys recorded that his wife first acquired “a pair of peruques of hair, as the fashion now is for ladies to wear; which are pretty, and are of my wife’s own hair, or else I should not endure them.” Then, after great hesitation, he bought a “periwigg” for himself and had his hair cut off and made into another.