Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers

by W. A. Clouston

For berdyd men wolde lyve in rest.

You prove yourselfe a homly gest,

So folysshely to rayle and jest;

For if I wolde go make in ryme,

How new shavyd men loke lyke scraped swyne,

And so rayle forth, from tyme to tyme,

A knavysshe laude then shulde be myne:

I fere it not.

What should this avail him? he asks; and so let us all be good friends, bearded and unbearded.[¹⁶⁶]

But Andrew Borde, if he did ever write a tract against beards, must have formerly held a different opinion on the subject, for in his Breviary of Health, first printed in 1546, he says: “The face may have many impediments. The first impediment is to see a man having no beard, and a woman to have a beard.” It was long a popular notion that the few hairs which are sometimes seen on the chins of very old women signified that they were in league with the arch-enemy of mankind—in plain English, that they were witches. The celebrated Three Witches who figure in Macbeth, “and palter with him in a double sense,” had evidently this distinguishing mark, for says Banquo to the “weird sisters” (Act i, sc. 2):