Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (11 page)

“The Normans are a turbulent race, and unless restrained by a firm government, are always ready for mischief.”
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This was how the English monk and historian Orderic Vitalis explained the tumultuous events in England and Normandy at the beginning of the 1100s. In this period, villages were sacked, churches burned, and hundreds killed as royals and noblemen battled each other for land and power. Vitalis believed the popular myth that the Norman nobility were especially combative because they were descended from the ancient Trojans. That is not true, of course; the Norman nobility were instead descended from Viking raiders who had landed in longboats on the shores of northern France less than two centuries earlier. They had settled down as landholders and adopted the customs of the Franks, who preserved more than other Europeans the cropped hair and clipped beards of Charlemagne’s day. Muslim visitors to Frankish lands were particularly unimpressed.
One remarked in the year 965 how dirty and unkempt the Franks were, reporting that “they shave their beards, and after shaving they sprout only a revolting stubble.”
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In spite of their accommodation to Frankish manners, however, Norman lords retained the warlike tendencies of their Viking ancestors. Under the leadership of Duke William, the Normans conquered England in 1066 and established one of Europe’s most powerful and enduring dynasties. Matters became very unsettled after William’s death in 1087, however, and both Normandy and England fell prey to a long struggle for power between his three sons.

In 1096, the bishops of Normandy tried their best to stem the violence. Gathering in a synod, or regional meeting, they declared the “peace of God.” They ordered all people above the age of twelve, on pain of excommunication, to foreswear violence during the holy feasts and the seasons of Lent and Advent. No one was to harm monks, nuns, women, merchants, or church property at any time. The synod also affirmed the church’s customary property rights and its power to fill church offices without lay interference. These resolutions for peace reveal the troubles of the Norman world, and as events would show, they were too often ignored.

Henry was the youngest and ablest of the three living sons of William the Conqueror, and over time Normans and Englishmen looked to him to end their troubles. Henry successfully claimed the throne of England in 1100 at the death of his brother William, while the oldest brother Robert, Duke of Normandy, was away on the first crusade. When Robert returned home, he struggled to restore his authority and maintain order in his dukedom, and Henry took advantage, declaring his intention to force his older brother out. Landing with an army on the Norman coast, the king of England gathered around him as many allies as he could muster.

One of those who hurried to Henry’s side was Bishop Serlo of Séez, whose diocese was particularly hard hit by internecine warfare and plunder. Both men had something to gain from the other. The bishop hoped for peace and royal support for the church, while young Henry hoped to garner legitimacy in his war against his brother. Henry made a promise to the bishop to take up arms for the defense of the people and the church. Serlo was pleased but sought a sign of the king’s good faith. It was Easter, and when the court had gathered for mass, the bishop
launched into a fiery sermon, chiding Henry and his men for the vanity of their long hair and beards, which had recently come into style. Long hair was the fashion of women, he declared, and insofar as they imitated feminine softness they lost their manly strength and became more liable to sin. The fashion for long beards was also an abomination. Vain men refrained from shaving their beards, he claimed, “for fear that the short bristles should prick their mistresses when they kiss them.”
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Their bushy faces, moreover, made them look more like Muslims than Christians. Long hair and beards were meant only for penitents who, burdened with sins, may “walk outwardly bristling and unshorn before men, and proclaim by their outward disgrace the baseness of the inner man.” He concluded his oration by flourishing a pair of scissors in his hand and calling upon both king and retainers to step forward to be shorn. Dutifully, Henry and his men advanced one by one to receive this extraordinary sacrament. The symbolic sacrifice of hair in return for the blessings of a bishop was deemed on both sides to be an excellent exchange.

Bishop Serlo was really making two different appeals in his scissor sermon. One was to press the king and his men to prove their piety and loyalty to the church. Another was his invocation of the illustrious example of Henry’s father, the great conqueror, who had shaved. He reminded them in this way of the good old days of Norman virtue and power.
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The scissors may have helped. Henry marched to victory over Robert, secured Normandy under his authority, and initiated a successful three-decade reign as heir to his father’s domains.

Serlo’s correlation of shaving with piety, virtue, and power continued to percolate in the minds of the English and Norman clergy. Writing a generation later, the English monk William of Malmesbury described in his famous history of England the marvelous power of Norman beardlessness during their assault on England. According to Malmesbury, the well-trimmed invaders astonished the English Saxons who imagined they faced an army of marauding priests.
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Maybe they did think so. The magnificent Bayeux Tapestry offers striking images of smooth-chinned Norman cavalrymen vanquishing mustachioed and bearded Saxon foot soldiers. In Malmesbury’s monkish imagination, the English could not have failed to note the striking contrast between themselves and the Normans, and must have been awed by the smooth-faced
superiority of the latter, whose higher moral discipline and “invincible spirit” assured their triumph.
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Bishop Serlo’s confrontation with Anglo-Norman facial hair was symbolic and brief. Henry and his successors soon fell in line with the contemporary standard of moderate beards, and the division between churchmen and laymen remained visible on men’s faces as well as in their clothing. As noted earlier,
The Song of Roland
, composed about this time, imagined Emperor Charlemagne ornamented with a dignified white beard. In the middle of the century, however, this secular beard trend was interrupted in dramatic fashion by a French king whose crisis of conscience and desperate need for a new start set secular manliness on a new course.

The medieval church enjoyed two great triumphs in France in the year 1144. Just north of Paris, the new ambulatory and choir on the east end of the Abbey of St. Denis was dedicated in a grand celebration headed by King Louis VII and his wife, Queen Eleanor. This addition was the first glorious achievement of Gothic architecture. Just a few months later, the king was back, leading a solemn procession to bury the bones of St. Denis, the patron saint of France, under the rebuilt choir. In a remarkable sign of humility, the king led the procession in penitential garb, including drab woolen tunic, sandals, and shaved face.
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Louis VII was determined, after the tumultuous and unsuccessful first years of his reign, to reverse his fortunes, submit to the guidance of God and the church, and win the admiration of his subjects.

The redesign of the abbey and the renovation of the king had a good deal in common. Both were inspired by the religious ideals of the era and sponsored by visionary abbots. The key idea in each case was inner beauty. The true splendor of a Gothic church like St. Denis, or Notre Dame, which was begun soon afterward, was inside rather than outside. The true greatness of a pious man was the same. As Burchard was to write a few years later, the inner beard was more beautiful than its exterior shadow.

The new St. Denis grew from the vision of Abbot Suger, who aspired
to glorify God and French royalty by creating a truly magnificent building. Suger and his master builder assembled a new combination of architectural elements, particularly an exterior buttress system, which relieved the exterior walls of most of their weight-bearing duties. This allowed for the installation of large, stained-glass windows that admitted a flood of colored light. By his own account, Suger was thrilled by the visual effect, “by virtue of which the whole [church] would shine with the wonderful and uninterrupted light of most sacred windows, pervading the interior beauty.”
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Flooding King Louis with spiritual light was rather more complicated. This was the project of St. Bernard, the Cistercian abbot of Clairveaux and one of the most dynamic and influential personalities of medieval history. Louis had been crowned and wed at the tender age of seventeen to the strong-minded Eleanor, and though he had been schooled in the quiet confines of St. Denis, he was determined to prove himself a forceful commander of his armed forces. Unfortunately, Louis soon got himself trapped in two of the most dangerous political minefields of the age, the politics of the church and of divorce. When a powerful nobleman, Raoul of Vermandois, divorced his wife to marry Queen Eleanor’s sister, Petronilla, the new couple was summarily excommunicated by the pope. Louis sought to defend his sister-in-law and her husband and also to confront the pope over appointments to key bishoprics. His reward was a papal interdict on the royal court, depriving it of the holy sacraments until he and his noble retainers mended their ways. Louis lashed out and, ignoring the pleas of pious Abbot Bernard, launched an ill-advised war against the Count of Champagne, who opposed Raoul’s divorce and supported the pope’s cause against Louis.

To the king’s dismay, the war degenerated into a bloody stalemate, and Louis himself witnessed a massacre of villagers by his own troops, who set fire to a church filled with a thousand men, women, and children who had fled there for safety. The horrors of his war, and Bernard’s continued censures, finally chastened the young king. Frustrated and confused, Louis sank into depression, retiring to his private chambers for days on end, barely able to act or speak. Bernard, summoned to advise the forlorn monarch, urged the king to make a fresh start, repent his sins, and settle matters with the pope and the Count of Champagne.
Heeding Bernard’s advice, Louis made peace and embarked on his penitential march at St. Denis.
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For him and for France, it was a new beginning. Three years later, again at the urging of Bernard, he personally led the second crusade to the Holy Land. Though not at all a successful crusader, his reputation for goodness and piety continued to grow until his death in 1180.

By presenting himself at St. Denis in the manner he did, Louis VII was setting two precedents for French royalty: piety and beardlessness. Over the next three and a half centuries, the former was not regularly observed, but the latter was. It proved easier to look virtuous than to be virtuous. Louis would have been most proud of his great-grandson, Louis IX, who outshone his forebear by leading not one but two crusades and by being canonized after his death.

Both Louis VII’s and Louis IX’s passion for crusading reinforced their royal style. Crusading knights often chose beardlessness because of Frankish tradition, because it fit their religious mission, and because it helped distinguish them from their Muslim opponents.
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In Spain, where crusading was a virtually permanent state of affairs for Christian kings hoping to expand their domains, the Muslims who fell under their control were required to grow their beards long so that they could easily be distinguished from their short-bearded Christian superiors.
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In the battle for Antioch in the Holy Land during the first crusade, in 1098, it was said that many crusaders accidently killed each other in street battles, having grown out their beards during the long campaign. A papal representative, Bishop Le Puy, begged the men to get back to shaving so this would not happen again.
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Facial hair thereafter was a generally reliable sign of whose side you were on. So reliable, in fact, that it could occasionally be exploited. In 1190, during the third crusade, an Arab supply ship under the command of the sultan Saladin succeeded in breaking through a crusader blockade of the harbor of Acre when the Arab sailors disguised themselves as Westerners by flying flags with the cross, allowing pigs to roam the deck, and shearing off their beards.
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The crusaders’ unique blend of religious and military life was institutionalized with the creation of two crusading orders, the Hospitallers and the Templars. Brothers of these orders were not temporary military pilgrims but permanent fighting monks. Apart from the fact that their calling was primarily fighting rather than praying, their vows and
lifestyle were similar to those of other monastic orders. They were to remain unmarried and chaste, live in common with other brothers, and observe a discipline of humility and obedience. They were a sort of crossover version of monasticism, existing somewhat ambiguously between a life of the world and a life of seclusion. Their rules about hair were similarly ambiguous. The original rule of the Templars, drawn
up in 1129, instructed each brother to wear his hair so that he “can be considered from the front or back as regular and ordained.”
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The same rule applied to facial hair, “so that no excess of vice of the face may be noted.” A Templar, in other words, was expected to look like an ordinary monk.

When they followed this rule, the Knights of the Temple had a short beard at most. Later, the brothers switched course, adopting the custom of long beards.
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There is no record of when or why they did this, but they had at least two good motives. For one thing, this style resolved any uncertainty about the Templars’ calling: beards declared unambiguously that they were fighters and not choir-monks. Another advantage was a trademark look. As the permanent guardians of the Holy Land, they were an elite force, not to be confused with knights errant who served temporary tours of duty. Their distinctiveness could also work against them, of course. Muslim forces often killed bearded Christian prisoners on the spot, assuming they were members of the detested order.

The era of the crusades ended in 1291 with the loss of the last Christian foothold in the Holy Land. Just over a decade later, French king Philip IV, grandson of the pious crusader Louis IX, arrested the pope in a dispute over church taxes, and effectively placed the papacy under his control. A decade after this, Philip arrested, shaved, and executed the leaders of the Templar order and seized its property. Philip had no interest in serving the church; he wanted it the other way around. The balance of power in Europe was now shifting decisively away from the popes and bishops in favor of the kings and nobles. One might suppose that the rise of the laity might spell the end of professional shaving as well, but the opposite proved to be the case. Laymen may have shown less respect for churchmen, but they still honored the goodness and discipline of a beardless face. As a result, shaving became almost universal by the late 1300s. With their razors, laymen claimed for themselves the inner beard once monopolized by churchmen.

In the late Middle Ages, facial hair no longer distinguished different orders of men. Instead, it represented qualities to which all men of good breeding aspired, regardless of their station in life. By the same token, facial hair carried negative associations. A marvelous demonstration of this symbolism is an illustration in an edition of Aristotle’s
Politics
that
was presented to the French king Charles V in 1376.
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Here the artist vividly depicts Aristotle’s three basic forms of government in both their good and bad forms. In the first illustration (
figure 5.4
), the forms of good government appear in stylized tableaux from top to bottom: monarchy, aristocracy, and “tymocracy” (a kind of meritocracy). The facing
page (
figure 5.5
) offers visions of these forms twisted toward evil: tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy (mob rule). The contrast between good and bad is apparent in the clothing and facial hair of the central figures in each panel. Men of bad government wear chain mail, carry weapons, and flourish long, bushy, or forked beards. Men of good government,
like men of the church, wear robes and are closely shorn. In his effort to illustrate Aristotle’s ideas, the medieval artist relied upon commonplace notions of manliness: well-trimmed men are clearly wiser and more benevolent.

This carefully crafted presentation of favorable and unfavorable manliness was the culmination of centuries of church teaching, law, and practice, promoted by men like Pope Gregory VII, Bishops Serlo and Bruno, and Abbot Burchard. It was further advanced by the example of pious crusader-kings, such as Louis VII and Louis IX. These men of faith took pride in their humility, insisting that beardlessness and baldness were emblems of spiritual power that entitled them to honor and authority. Churchmen separated themselves from the warrior patriarchy and, for a time, looked distinctive as well. The propaganda worked so well that in spite of—or perhaps because of—the gradually waning power of the church in political and social life, laymen took up the discipline of shaving and its associated virtues.