than in England. Louis VII., however, was more
obedient than his brother-king, and cropped himself as closely as a monk,
to the great sorrow of all the gallants of his court. His queen, the gay,
haughty, and pleasure-seeking Eleanor of Guienne, never admired him in
this trim, and continually reproached him with imitating, not only the
head-dress, but the asceticism of the monks. From this cause a coldness
arose between them. The lady proving at last unfaithful to her shaven and
indifferent lord, they were divorced, and the kings of France lost the
rich provinces of Guienne and Poitou, which were her dowry. She soon after
bestowed her hand and her possessions upon Henry Duke of Normandy,
afterwards Henry II. of England, and thus gave the English sovereigns that
strong footing in France which was for so many centuries the cause of such
long and bloody wars between the nations. When the Crusades had drawn all
the smart young fellows into Palestine, the clergy did not find it so
difficult to convince the staid burghers who remained in Europe, of the
enormity of long hair. During the absence of Richard Coeur de Lion, his
English subjects not only cut their hair close, but shaved their faces.
William Fitz-osbert, or Long-beard, the great demagogue of that day,
reintroduced among the people who claimed to be of Saxon origin the
fashion of long hair. He did this with the view of making them as unlike
as possible to the citizens and the Normans. He wore his own beard hanging
down to his waist, from whence the name by which he is best known to
posterity.

The Church never shewed itself so great an enemy to the beard as to long
hair on the head. It generally allowed fashion to take its own course,
both with regard to the chin and the upper lip. This fashion varied
continually; for we find that, in little more than a century after the
time of Richard I., when beards were short, that they had again become so
long as to be mentioned in the famous epigram made by the Scots who
visited London in 1327, when David, son of Robert Bruce, was married to
Joan, the sister of King Edward. This epigram, which was stuck on the
church-door of St. Peter Stangate, ran as follows:

"Long beards heartlesse,
Painted hoods witlesse,
Gray coats gracelesse,
Make England thriftlesse."

When the Emperor Charles V. ascended the throne of Spain he had no beard.
It was not to be expected that the obsequious parasites who always
surround a