Return Of The Beard!

Beards were the surprising topic that featured frequently in my university reading lists, much to mine and a friends amusement (for what about a ‘friendly mutton chop’ is not giggle provoking?). Whether it was the ‘Renaissance Beard’ a study of masculinity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries or the attribute of a saint, beards seem to have been everywhere in history. Even excessive hair could be seen as a feature of monstrosity or ‘otherness’, and it was in this form that I encountered beards in an exam.

                Gerald of Wales was a late twelfth-century author, royal clerk and ecclesiastic. He was born of an English father and a Welsh mother, so knew firsthand what it was like to be on the edge of society.

He travelled to Ireland several times and recorded his observations in The History and Topography of Ireland. He wrote that “for just as the marvels of the East have through the work of certain authors come to the light of public notice, so the marvels of the West which, so far, have remained hidden away and almost unknown, may eventually find in me one to make them known even in these later days.”

                In Mappa Mundi, such as the famous Hereford Map, Britain was placed on the edges of the world along with the monstrous races in the south and east. In revealing the ‘wonders of the West’ Gerald was effectively redrawing the edges of the world and increasing England’s centrality whilst marginalising Ireland.

                Gerald described many ‘wonders’ and ‘miracles’ that he saw in Ireland or was told about, such as bestial relations between men and animals, werewolves, and women with beards. In BL, Royal MS 13 B VIII, written whilst he was probably living in Lincoln, Gerald described a woman with a beard and a mane on her back.

The Bearded Woman of Limerick,
BL, Royal MS 13 B VIII, f. 19.

 “Duvenaldus, the king of Limerick, had a woman that had a beard down to her waist. She had also a crest from her neck down along her spine, like a one-year-old foal. It was covered with hair. This woman in spite of these two deformities was, nevertheless, not hermaphrodite, and was in other respects sufficiently feminine. She followed the court wherever it went, provoking laughs as well as wonder. She followed neither fatherland nor nature in having a hairy spine; but in wearing her beard long, she was following the custom of her fatherland, not of her nature.”

                Gerald’s attitude to these ‘wonders of the West’ was quite different to contemporary writers such as Matthew Paris. There was no loud condemnation of the bearded woman or any additional Christian moralisation of her ‘monstrosity’. It has been said that in writing The History and Topography of Ireland, Gerald reinvented the ethnographical genre, as he sought to describe the customs and characteristics of different cultures.

Beards and hair however continued to be a defining attribute of the medieval character.