"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 Their beards against me." In Shirley's play, _A Contention for Honour and Riches_, 1633:-- "You have worn a sword thus long to show ye hilt, Now let the blade appear. COURTIER.--Good Captain Voice, It shall, and teach you manners; I have yet No ague, I can look upon your buff, And punto beard, and call for no strong waters." "It is difficult to ascertain," says Repton, "when the custom of pulling the nose superseded that of pulling the beard, but most probably when the chin became naked and close shaven, affording no longer a handle for insult." In the reign of James II., William Cavendish, Earl of Devonshire, paid L30,000 for offering this insult to a person at Court. An earlier instance of pulling the nose may be found in Ben Jonson's _Epicaene, or the Silent Woman_, Act iv. sc. 5. In "Aubrey's Letters" is an allusion to wiping the beard. "Ralph Kettle, D.D.," we read, "preached in St Mary's Church at Oxford, and, in conclusion of a sermon, said, 'But now I see it is time for me to shutt up my booke, for I see the doctors' men come in wiping their beards from the ale-house' (he could from the pulpit plainly see them, and 't was their custome to go there, and, about the end of the Sermon, to return to wayte on their masters)." An old play by Lyly, entitled _Mother Bombie_ (1597-98), Act i. sc. 3, contains the following passage:-- "Tush, spit not you, and I'll warrant I, my beard is as good as a handkerchief." Our quotations from old plays are mainly drawn from Repton's little book, "Some account of the Beard and Moustachio," of which one hundred copies were printed for private circulation in 1839.