Note 28 — MODERN HISTORY.
Reading edition
Although an attempt was made in this reign to restrain the growth of legal Beards by some pragmatical heads of Lincoln’s Inn, who passed a resolution “that no fellow of that house should wear a Beard of above a fortnight’s growth;” and although transgression was punished with fine, loss of commons, and final expulsion, such was the vigorous resistance to this act of tyranny, that in the following year all previous orders respecting Beards were repealed. Percy Anecdotes.
About the same time also in Germany the moustache was partially substituted for the Beard, as appears by Berckemej’s Europ. Antiq. p. 294, who under the year 1564 says, the Archbishop Sigismund introduced in Magdeburgh the custom of shaving off the full Beard and wearing instead a moustache. The year in which this Beard-reformation (de-formation?) happened, was contained in this pentameter—
“Longa sIgIsMVnDo barba IVbente perIt.”
“Sigismund commanding, the long Beard perished in
MDLVV (= X) IIII. or 1564.”