there, to whom my character is odious, and have every Anabaptist come to
pull me by the beard." This insulting saying is by no means confined to
England. To demand a person's beard was regarded as a still greater
insult. King Ryons, when he sent a messenger to King Arthur to demand
his beard, received the following answer:--

"Wel, sayd Arthur, thou hast said thy message, ye whiche is ye
most vylaynous and lewdest message that ever man herd sent unto a kynge.
Also thou mayst see, my berd is ful yong yet to make a purfyl of hit.
But telle thou thy kynge this, I owe hym none homage, ne none of myn
elders, but, or it be longe to, he shall do me homage on bothe his
kneys, or else he shall lese his hede by ye feith of my body, for
this is ye most shamefullest message that ever I herd speke of. I
have aspyed, thy kyng met never yet with worshipful men; but tell hym, I
wyll have his hede without he doo me homage. Thenne ye messager
departed." ("The Byrth, Lyf and Actes of Kyng Arthur," edit, by Caxton,
1485, reprinted 1817.)

"To make any one's beard" is an old saying, which means "to cheat him,"
or "to deceive him." We read in Chaucer's _Prologue to the Wife of
Bath_ thus:--

"In faith he shal not kepe me, but me lest:
Yet coude I make his berd, so mete I the"

[Illustration: Geoffrey Chaucer, born about 1340, died 1400.]

And again, in the "Reve's Tale," the Miller said:--

"I trow, the clerkes were aferde
Yet can a miller make a clerkes bearde,
For all his art."

A more familiar saying is "To beard a person," meaning to affront him,
or to set him at defiance. Todd explains the allusion in a note in his
edition of Spenser's _Faerie Queene_--"did beard affront him to his
face"; so Shakespeare's _King Henry IV._, Part I. Act i.: "I beard thee
to thy face"--Fr. "Faire la Barbe a quelqu'un." Ital. "Fa la barbe ad
uno" (Upton.)

See Steevens's note on the use of the word Beard in _King Henry IV._,
which is adopted, he says, "from romances, and originally signified to
'cut off the beard.'" Mr John Ady Repton, F.S.A., to whom we are mainly
indebted for our illustrations of these popular sayings, directs
attention to a specimen of defiance expressed in Agamemnon's speech to
Achilles, as translated by Chapman:--

--"and so tell thy strength how eminent
My power is, being compared with thine;
all other making feare
To vaunt equality with me, or in this
proud kind beare
Th