By the rules of the Church of Rome, lay monks were compelled to wear their beards, and only the priests were permitted to shave.[160] The clergy at length became so corrupt and immoral, and lived such scandalous lives, that they could not be distinguished from the laity except by their close-shaven faces.  The first Reformers, therefore, to mark their separation from the Romish Church, allowed their beards to grow.  Calvin, Fox, Cranmer, and other leaders of the Reformation are all represented in their portraits with long flowing beards.  John Knox, the great Scottish Reformer, wore, as is well known, a beard of prodigious length.

  [160] In a scarce old poem, entitled, The Pilgrymage and the
        Wayes of Jerusalem, we read: 

The thyrd Seyte beyn prestis of oure lawe, That synge masse at the Sepulcore; At the same grave there oure lorde laye, They synge the leteny every daye.  In oure manner is her [i.e. their] songe, Saffe, here [i.e. their] berdys be ryght longe, That is the geyse of that contre, The lenger the berde the bettyr is he; The order of hem [i.e. them] be barfote freeres.

The ancient Britons shaved the chin and cheeks, but wore their moustaches down to the breast.  Our Saxon ancestors wore forked beards.  The Normans at the Conquest shaved not only the chin, but also the back of the head.  But they soon began to grow very long beards.  During the Wars of the Roses beards grew “small by degrees and beautifully less.”

Queen Mary of England, in the year 1555, sent to Moscow four accredited agents, who were all bearded; but one of them, George Killingworth, was particularly distinguished by a beard five feet two inches long, at the sight of which, it is said, a smile crossed the grim features of Ivan the Terrible himself; and no wonder.  But the longest beard known out of fairy tales was that of Johann Mayo, the German painter, commonly called “John the Bearded.”  His beard actually trailed on the ground when he stood upright, and for convenience he usually kept it tucked in his girdle.  The emperor Charles V, it is said, was often pleased to cause Mayo to unfasten his beard and allow it to blow in the faces of his courtiers.—­A worthy clergyman in the time of Queen Elizabeth gave as the best reason he had for wearing a beard of enormous length, “that no act of his life might be unworthy of the gravity of his appearance.”

Queen Elizabeth, in the first year of her reign, made an abortive attempt to abolish her subjects’ beards by an impost of 3s. 4d. a year (equivalent to four times that sum in these “dear” days) on every beard of more than a fortnight’s growth.  And Peter the Great also laid a tax upon beards in Russia:  nobles’ beards were assessed at a rouble, and those of commoners at a copeck each.  “But such veneration,” says Giles Fletcher, “had this people for these ensigns of gravity that many of them carefully preserved their beards in their cabinets to be buried with them, imagining perhaps that they should make but an odd figure in their grave with their naked chins.”