"In faith he shal not kepe me, but me lest:
Yet coude I make his berd, so mete I the."
Geoffrey Chaucer, born about 1340, died 1400.
And again, in the "Reve's Tale," the Miller said:—
"I trow, the clerkes were aferde
Yet can a miller make a clerkes bearde,
For all his art."
A more familiar saying is "To beard a person," meaning to affront him, or to set him at defiance. Todd explains the allusion in a note in his edition of Spenser's Faerie Queene—"did beard affront him to his face"; so Shakespeare's King Henry IV., Part I. Act i.: "I beard thee to thy face"—Fr. "Faire la Barbe a quelqu'un." Ital. "Fa la barbe ad uno" (Upton.)
See Steevens's note on the use of the word Beard in King Henry IV., which is adopted, he says, "from romances, and originally signified to 'cut off the beard.'" Mr John Ady Repton, F.S.A., to whom we are mainly indebted for our illustrations of these popular sayings, directs attention to a specimen of defiance expressed in Agamemnon's speech to Achilles, as translated by Chapman:—