[166] The Treatise answerynge the boke of Berdes, Compyled by
Collyn Clowte, dedicated to Barnarde, Barber, dwellyng
in Banbury:  “Here foloweth a treatyse made, Answerynge
the treatyse of doctor Borde upon Berdes.”—­Appended to
reprint of Andrew Borde’s Introduction of Knowledge,
edited by Dr. F. J. Furnivall, for the Early English Text
Society, 1870—­see pp. 314, 315.

But Andrew Borde, if he did ever write a tract against beards, must have formerly held a different opinion on the subject, for in his Breviary of Health, first printed in 1546, he says:  “The face may have many impediments.  The first impediment is to see a man having no beard, and a woman to have a beard.”  It was long a popular notion that the few hairs which are sometimes seen on the chins of very old women signified that they were in league with the arch-enemy of mankind—­in plain English, that they were witches.  The celebrated Three Witches who figure in Macbeth, “and palter with him in a double sense,” had evidently this distinguishing mark, for says Banquo to the “weird sisters” (Act i, sc. 2): 

                          You should be women,
  And yet your beards forbid me to interpret
  That you are so.

And in the ever-memorable scene in the Merry Wives of Windsor, when Jack Falstaff, disguised as the fat woman of Brentford, is escaping from Ford’s house, he is cuffed and mauled by Ford, who exclaims, “Hang her, witch!” on which the honest Cambrian Sir Hugh Evans sapiently remarks:  “Py yea and no, I think the ’oman is a witch indeed.  I like not when a ’oman has a great peard.  I spy a great peard under her muffler!” (Act iv, sc. 2.)

There have been several notable bearded women in different parts of Europe.  The Duke of Saxony had the portrait painted of a poor Swiss woman who had a remarkably fine, large beard.  Bartel Graefje, of Stuttgart, who was born in 1562, was another bearded woman.  In 1726 there appeared at Vienna a female dancer with a large bushy beard.  Charles XII of Sweden had in his army a woman who wore a beard a yard and a half in length.  In 1852 Mddle.  Bois de Chene, who was born at Genoa in 1834, was exhibited in London:  she had “a profuse head of hair, a strong black beard, and large bushy whiskers.”  It is not unusual to see dark beauties in our own country with a moustache which must be the envy of “young shavers.”  And, apropos, the poet Rogers is said to have had a great dislike of ladies’ beards, such as this last described; and he happened to be in a circulating library turning over the books on the counter, when a lady, who seemed to cherish her beard with as much affection as the young gentlemen aforesaid, alighted from her carriage, and, entering the shop, asked the librarian for a certain book.  The polite man of books replied that he was sorry he had not a copy at present.  “But,” said Roger, slily, “you have the Barber of