Beards: Fashion for the Chin

5 min readMay 4, 2024

You can’t deny that beards have increased in popularity in the last 20 or so years. My unasked for and completely unscientific opinion is that it comes from soldiers coming home from Afghanistan wearing beards. Regardless of my random guess, it is an element of world-building we too often ignore to our peril. Consider the following options:

Early Beards

A coin from around India that dates to the 400’s depicts the Alchon Hun king as clean-shaven.

On the other hand, whole essays have been written on the Norse depictions of men with prominent mustaches and long beards. Egyptian pharaohs are depicted with stylized beards as a matter of status, as average Ancient Egyptian men were meticulously clean-shaven.

Ancient Greeks seemed to associate beards with virility and high-status, so the likes of Socrates rocked facial hair. Mesopotamians agreed with the Ancient Greeks, judging from the florid beards they painted on their leaders.

Ancient Romans derided beards in the late Republican period into the 2nd century AD as a sign of fussiness and overindulgence, but the beard returned to fashion under Emperor Hadrian, as he grew his beard out. Two emperors, Aurelius and Severus, followed his lead, and, predictably, less exalted men took their cues from their emperors.

Medieval Beards

Charlemagne famously grew his moustache out, possibly to distinguish himself from the Merovingian kings, who didn’t.

There are many, many combs in the archeology of the early medieval period, so we know that combing your hair was important to people. Whether there was a comb specific to facial hair is difficult to say, but funeral masks of men from early in the period featured prominent moustaches, and pictures such as those of Picts depict beards. A stone from Brough of Birsay shows a line of soldiers following a man with a distinctive pointed beard, and the famous Freyr figurine from Rällinge, Södermanland has a long beard. We can safely say that prominent beards were considered pretty normal in Europe

Beard As Religious Statement

Hair was considered a type of excrement with Humoral theory: it took cold and damp to grow a lot of. This was, in their minds, why many men would go bald. Men were ‘naturally’ hot and dry, inhospitable to hair growth.

This meant that, for a while, Western thought considered hair a symbol of worldliness. Botichelli’s Venus is covered in hair, and the fact that women could grow lots of hair was held against them.

It also meant that devout men shaved: the beard was too worldly and natural, frequently associated with sex and evil. Hence, the tonsure and rigorous, regular shaving.

Certainly, the beard could be associated with ‘pagan’ behavior, as Alcuin, Charlemagne’s buddy, said when he scolded Anglo-Saxons for ‘trimming their hair and beard like the pagans.’ (Pagan doesn’t really mean anything. I think he meant the Norse.)

The church flip-flopped on this a little over time, though. In the 800’s, removing the beard was important to your salvation. Priests in the Greek Orthodox branch stayed clean-shaven through the 900’s, but Roman Catholic priests grew beards. This was promptly reversed in the 1000’s, with an archbishop in Rouen declaring beards incompatible with church service in 1096 and Venice banning long beards in 1102 in a fit of religious zeal.

Burchard of Bellevaux, a Cisterian abbot in Belerne, wrote ‘Apologia de Barbis.’ This is translated as A Defense of Beards. This is a three-part, 170-page treatise on how lay brothers, men who helped run a monastery but didn’t take orders, should treat their beards. Apparently, this was an apology for an earlier letter that sounded like he was condemning lay brothers’ facial hair, which suggests there were many bearded dudes slopping out the monastery’s stables.

In the Apologia de Barbis, he proclaims that you should only burn your beard if you are guilty of something, and that lay brothers, in particular should grow beards. These beards were heavily symbolic to Burchard, and important to one’s spiritual life. A long beard could make you laughable to the beardless, but a well-trimmed beard was a sign of maturity and wisdom. He even spends time on the question of whether you will shave in Heaven. His answer was no.

However, monks needed to shave. Period.

Beard As Class Statement

Beards are a bit like six-inch heels: They say something about the resources you can sink into your appearance at the cost of the rest of your day. Getting a clean shave every day before the invention of the safety razor required a servant or professional barber, lots of time, and various paraphernalia. Not surprisingly, being clean shaven or having a very small beard was frequently trending.

In fact, Americans and other Westerners tend to view beards as unprofessional. We Americans haven’t elected a president who wore a beard since Taft in the 1930's, and Brits vocally objected to a favorite reporter growing a beard in 2013. King Gillette making safety razors something most men had in their bathrooms reinforced this.

This was not always the case, however. There is an Irish poem from the 14th century that clearly assigned beards to warriors and clan chiefs. Artisans, doctors, smiths, and home-builders did not rate beards and had to shave once a month at least. Some idiot in 1880 even declared that a bare chin was a sure sign of a lack of virility.

Conclusion:

The cool dudes were rocking beards at one time and weren’t another, and all the other dudes wanted to be like the cool dudes. We are a group species, so this is coded in our DNA.

I suspect screeds such as Burchard’s are backfilled explanations for a common practice, but what do I know. Regardless, when you right your epic tale of a knight in Charlemagne’s court, be sure to put some moustaches on him, and maybe an un-Merovingian-like goatee.