Facial hair's formative years: what the Vikings and Romans did for male grooming

Facial hair has been represented in art since the first cave person picked up a piece of charcoal and decided to draw a man. Early art also reveals that facial hair has long been tamed – usually by being clipped or plucked – suggesting that the all-important question of ‘To shave or not to shave?’ has been around for almost as long as humans themselves. Over the centuries facial hair has fallen in and out of fashion. Hairy faces have been lauded, derided, commemorated in art and even legislated against.

In ancient Egypt, for example, shaving was associated with cleanliness, so priests shaved themselves entirely and would then wear a stylised false beard for ceremonial purposes. Surviving Egyptian art suggests that non-priests also wore false beards, in this case to emphasise that they were followers of the god Osiris. Pharaohs wore false beards of a particular design – one that splayed out at the bottom. The classic straight, plaited beard with a turned-up end, such as that known from the famous death mask of King Tutankhamun, would not have been a style worn by a pharaoh during life: this was a specific shape worn only in death. Of course, it is impossible to know what the average Egyptian male looked like and if he did or didn’t wear facial hair, as art doesn’t tend to record the people who weren’t famous or royal. Wearing a false beard became so fashionable that it was not confined just to pharaohs or even to adults. At the British Museum in London is the coffin of an infant: a mini mummy case complete with childlike features and a long stylised beard.

Queen Hatshepsut depicted as Sphinx (Photo: Alamy)

The ceremonial beard took on a whole new dimension in the 1400s BC, following the death of Thutmose II. His unconventional widow, Hatshepsut, decided that she did not want her young nephew (who was also her stepson, as she had married her brother) to succeed his father.

Instead she declared herself the new ruler. In order to make herself appear more pharaoh-like, she began wearing a false beard – that, after all, was what rulers did. The images that survive of Hatshepsut are remarkable for the way in which her representations change from showing her as a sexually alluring female, with clearly defined breasts and waist, to that of a more masculine-looking and therefore acceptable pharaoh; finally evolving into a beard-wearing sphinx.

Of course, shaving, as we know it today, wasn’t possible before the discovery of metals. In the earliest times men plucked out their facial hair – archaeologists have discovered ancient ‘tweezers’ made of hinged seashells or bones – or they used pumice stones to slough it away. In fact, many millennia before the word ‘metrosexual’ was even thought of, the depilatory methods of waxing and sugaring were being used by men as well as women. (Sugaring, incidentally, involves applying a sticky paste of sugar or honey to the skin, then peeling it off and taking the hair with it.)

Archaeologists in Egypt have uncovered ancient razors, and the Greek writer and historian Herodotus recorded in 440 BC that in Egypt ‘priests shave their whole body every other day, that no lice or other impure thing may adhere to them when they are engaged in the service of the gods’. He also revealed that when they were in mourning, the priests stopped shaving, allowing their hair and beards to grow until the mourning period was over. Herodotus himself was rather scornful of such behaviour, as his Greek contemporaries were very proud of their beards.

A portrait of Henry I by an unknown artist, c 1620 (Image: National Portrait Gallery)

Indeed, being able to grow a full beard at that time was a sign of high status and wisdom. Many statues show notable Greeks with fine curly beards, even if the sitter’s own beard wasn’t quite as lustrous as the sculptor depicted it. Many Greek men wished to emulate the gods Zeus and Heracles, both of whom are defined in art by huge beards. Ancient Greek men would also use hot tongs to make their beards hang in long, lustrous curls.

The men of ancient Rome had a more ambiguous relationship with beards. They found the long curled beards of the Greeks somewhat off-putting, and those Romans who chose to wear beards tended to keep them clipped and neat. Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, King of Rome in the sixth century BC, is said to have introduced the razor to his countrymen and tried to encourage the habit of shaving. A century later, the fashion had finally caught on. By the second century BC, Pliny was reporting that the Roman general Scipio Africanus shaved every day. As fashion was dictated by the whim of the current emperor, when Hadrian, in the first century AD, wore a beard to disguise his blemished skin, facial hair once more became fashionable.

Throughout history, wearing facial hair or choosing to be clean-shaven has often become symbolic of a generational difference. In the ancient world, older men equated beards with sagacity, but as the fashion for shaving grew more widespread, younger men began to ridicule the sight of a man with a full beard. In the first century AD, Lucian of Samosata, a Greek satirist and writer, famously commented, ‘If you think that to grow a beard is to acquire wisdom, a goat with a fine beard is at once a complete Plato.’

This attitude would wax and wane throughout history as those with and without beards vied for superiority. In the fourth century AD, Ammianus Marcellinus, a Roman soldier, writer and historian, wrote to his fellow men, ‘Do you suppose that your beard creates brains ...? Take my advice and shave it off at once; for that beard is a creator of lice and not of brains.’

Alexander the Great insisted his soldiers shave before battle (Photo: Alamy)

The Greeks’ famed love of beards was to change under the leadership of Alexander the Great (356–323 BC). The Macedonian-born commander, who led the Greek Empire against the Persians, insisted that his soldiers shave before battle. His reasoning was that, in close combat, a beard could be grasped and used to pull an opponent off his horse. He therefore hired an army of barbers to shave his soldiers on the night before a battle.

Several centuries after the death of Alexander, people in Britain grew to distrust facial hair as much as the Macedonian general had done. The British Isles were under constant attack from a new and terrifying bearded scourge: the Vikings. It is usual for Vikings to be depicted with enormous unruly beards and moustaches and long straggly hair – indeed, this is what history classes still teach children about Viking hordes – yet Scandinavian archaeologists are quick to point out that these depictions are at odds with what they have discovered. One of the first myths to be dispelled is that of dirty, unkempt hair and beards, for among the most prevalent possessions found in Viking burial sites are grooming tools such as combs and tweezers, plus toothpicks and tools for cleaning beneath the fingernails. Vikings, it is now claimed, were possibly far more hygienic and much better groomed than their British opponents.

Several of the world’s major religions have very strict rules about the growth and maintenance of facial hair. And sometimes even subgroups within a religion have different rules from each other. This has certainly been the case within Christianity, where several factions have changed their minds on numerous occasions about whether or not facial hair is acceptable. Pope Leo III, who became head of the Roman Catholic Church in the final years of the eighth century AD, is famed as the first pontiff to be clean-shaven, and Catholic priests were expected to follow his example. On the other hand, priests belonging to the Greek Orthodox Church were still expected to have facial hair. The next bearded pope did not appear until the sixteenth century, when Pope Julius II grew facial hair, temporarily, as a mark of mourning. He was repeating the ancient Egyptians’ practice of not shaving for the seventy days of mourning their dead.

During these dark centuries for the bearded Christian, the Catholic Church waged a war on whiskers, Pope Gregory IV wrote a ninth-century diatribe against bearded priests, and by the early 1100s this pogonophobic feeling had spread to encompass not only priests but also all male worshippers. At mass on Christmas Day in 1105, a Bishop Godfrey was said to have refused Holy Communion to any man who had come to church unshaven. By this date the beard was being perceived in Britain as blasphemous and ‘unchristian’. In the same year, the French bishop Serlo of Séez compared bearded men to ‘goats and Saracens’. His sermon was delivered in the presence of the English king Henry I, who had resolutely kept his beard and thus incurred his Church’s displeasure. The Anglo-Norman monk and chronicler Orderic Vitalis also railed against the King’s beard. In the face of such public opposition, Henry was eventually induced to shave.

A cast of Edward, Prince of Wales by Domenico Brucciani, 1875 (Photo: National Portrait Gallery)

The bishop’s comment about Saracens had great political clout at that time. During the Crusades – the battles Christians waged against Saracen Muslims to regain the Holy Land – it became a sign of Christian piety to be beardless. This somewhat bemused the Saracens, who regarded facial hair as a sign of virility and therefore perceived their Christian opponents as oddly feminine. One notable Crusader who declined to shave, however, was Baldwin II, King of Jerusalem, who was crowned in 1118 and married the daughter of an Armenian prince. Known sometimes as ‘Bearded Baldwin’ or ‘Baldwin the Beard’, he famously extorted a large ‘ransom’ from his father-in-law, Gabriel, for whom the wearing of a beard was an essential sign of manhood. The story goes that Baldwin, aware of Gabriel’s abhorrence for shaven faces, claimed he had ‘mortgaged’ his beard for the enormous sum of 30,000 gold bezants in order to fund his army. So horrified was Gabriel at the thought of a beardless son-in-law that he paid the astronomical sum to ensure his daughter’s husband kept his facial hair intact.

By medieval times the Crusaders’ choice to have shaven faces was increasingly outmoded. That later warriors would happily grow large beards is proved by medieval armour: helmets survive that were specially fashioned to accommodate a beard. The fourteenth-century knight Edward, Lord Despenser, is depicted with a face covered by chain mail, yet with his dapper moustache still visible as it flows over the edges of his armour. The same can be seen in the National Portrait Gallery’s copy of a medieval statue of Edward, Prince of Wales (known as the ‘Black Prince’ after his black suit of armour). The tails of his long moustache break free of the chain mail that covers most of his face and turn the statue into a distinctive portrait, rather than simply another anonymous knight in armour.

This is an edited extract from Moustaches, Whiskers and Beards by Lucinda Hawksley (National Portrait Gallery, £10), available to order from Telegraph Books at £9.00 + £1.95 p&p. Call 0844 871 1515 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk