The announcement by M. Macron that the Bayeux Tapestry will be lent for a year to the British Museum, whilst its normal home in Bayeux is reconstructed, was one of the highlights of his State Visit last week. As the loan will extend into 2027 it will also celebrate the millennium of the birth of King William I.
Coincidentally I came across a relevant article on the often irritating, but also frequently informative website, Quora. This directly related to the Tapestry as it concerned the hair styles affected by the Norman men in it - a fringe at the front but with the area above the ears and from the nape of the neck almost to the crown of the head shaved. It makes King Henry V and his contemporaries look positively long haired.
The comments quoted from Aelfric of Eynsham, writing about 1000, can be compared with those of Alcuin of York, writing from the continent in the wake of the Viking raid on Lindisfarne in 793, which he appears to blame, in part at least, on what he had presumably observed on a recent visit to his homeland, the fashion for long hair amongst the Northumbrian elite - such seeming effeminacy was clearly responsible ….
The article, with the comments - less interesting or relevant - can be seen at
2 comments:
I wonder if one reason for the Norman hairstyle wasn't to allow a helmet to be more firmly anchored by short bristles to the back of the head. If a helmeted soldier was clumped on the side of the head during combat, then a full head of sweaty hair at the back would more readily allow the helmet to rotate sideways, especially if the helmet was fairly round and not a close fit to the contours of the head, and misaligned eye slits or a broken nose are just what one doesn't need when in close quarter combat!
Given that they would have wrapped wool or canvas padding round their head before donning a helmet, another reason for lack of hair at the back would be to better discharge heat from the head, since hair at the back would be a heat insulator retaining heat beneath it.
There is a related question of whether Normans ever sported moustaches. I believe many did while on campaign, not the droopy Saxon style but a "straight across" style which would have allowed sweat to drain through it from below the padding, and in part to be slurped to help retain fluids. The name "Algernon" derives from the Norman "al guernon" meaning "the 'tache".
Cheers
John R Ramsden (jrq@gmx.com)
Those seem eminently possible practical explanations.
From those it could become the “thing” to do as a soldier, a badge of a specific calling. When King Henry I landed in Normandy to seize the Duchy from his brother Duke Robert in 1106 he went to Mass and the local bishop, obviously primed, produced scissors from his sleeve and cut the kneeling King’s hai into a military cut instead of the longer hairstyle he had affected. Hairstyles mattered - and their ubiquity - as with the early fifteenth century ‘pudding basin’ cut, the ‘page boy’ look of the 1460s to 1520s, the sixteenth century short back and sides, or the earlier seventeenth century flowing locks - or even the ‘short back and sides’ of the inter- and post- war world.
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