And ever as it blazed they threw on him
Great pails of puddled mire to quench the hair (v, 1).
In Persia and India when a wife is found to have been unfaithful, her hair—the distinguishing ornament of woman, as the beard is considered to be that of man—is shaved off, among other indignities.
Don Sebastian Cobbarruvius gravely relates the following marvellous legend to show that nothing so much disgraced a Spaniard as pulling his beard: “A noble of that nation dying (his name Cid Lai Dios), a Jew, who hated him much in his lifetime, stole privately into the room where his body was laid out, and, thinking to do what he never durst while living, stooped down and plucked his beard; at which the body started up, and drawing out half way his sword, which lay beside him, put the Jew in such a fright that he ran out of the room as if a thousand devils had been behind him. This done, the body lay down as before to rest; and,” adds the veracious chronicler, “the Jew after that turned Christian.”—In the third of Don Quevedo’s Visions of the Last Judgment, we read that a Spaniard, after receiving sentence, was taken into custody by a pair of demons who happened to disorder the set of his moustache, and they had to re-compose them with a pair of curling-tongs before they could get him to proceed with them!
By the rules of the Church of Rome, lay monks were compelled to wear their beards, and only the priests were permitted to shave.[160] The clergy at length became so corrupt and immoral, and lived such scandalous lives, that they could not be distinguished from the laity except by their close-shaven faces. The first Reformers, therefore, to mark their separation from the Romish Church, allowed their beards to grow. Calvin, Fox, Cranmer, and other leaders of the Reformation are all represented in their portraits with long flowing beards. John Knox, the great Scottish Reformer, wore, as is well known, a beard of prodigious length.
The ancient Britons shaved the chin and cheeks, but wore their moustaches down to the breast. Our Saxon ancestors wore forked beards. The Normans at the Conquest shaved not only the chin, but also the back of the head. But they soon began to grow very long beards. During the Wars of the Roses beards grew “small by degrees and beautifully less.”
Queen Mary of England, in the year 1555, sent to Moscow four accredited agents, who were all bearded; but one of them, George Killingworth, was particularly distinguished by a beard five feet two inches long, at the sight of which, it is said, a smile crossed the grim features of Ivan the Terrible himself; and no wonder. But the longest beard known out of fairy tales was that of Johann Mayo, the German painter, commonly called “John the Bearded.” His beard actually trailed on the ground when he stood upright, and for convenience he usually kept it tucked in his girdle. The emperor Charles V, it is said, was often pleased to cause Mayo to unfasten his beard and allow it to blow in the faces of his courtiers.—A worthy clergyman in the time of Queen Elizabeth gave as the best reason he had for wearing a beard of enormous length, “that no act of his life might be unworthy of the gravity of his appearance.”
Queen Elizabeth, in the first year of her reign, made an abortive attempt to abolish her subjects’ beards by an impost of 3s. 4d. a year (equivalent to four times that sum in these “dear” days) on every beard of more than a fortnight’s growth. And Peter the Great also laid a tax upon beards in Russia: nobles’ beards were assessed at a rouble, and those of commoners at a copeck each. “But such veneration,” says Giles Fletcher, “had this people for these ensigns of gravity that many of them carefully preserved their beards in their cabinets to be buried with them, imagining perhaps that they should make but an odd figure in their grave with their naked chins.”
The beard of the renowned Hudibras was portentous, as we learn from Butler, who thus describes the Knight’s hirsute honours:
His tawny beard was th’ equal grace