Part 31

The _Chanson de Roland_ shows us "the pride of France" as "that good bearded folk," with their beards hanging over coats of mail, and it makes the great emperor swear to Naimes by his beard. It was only about the year 1000, according to Rodolf Glaber, that men began in the north of France to wear short hair and shave "like actors"; and even in the Bayeux tapestry the old Norman shipwrights wear the beard. But so rare was hair on the face amongst the Norman invaders that William, the forefather of the Percys, was known in his lifetime and remembered after his death as William "Asgernuns" or "Oht les gernuns," i.e. "William with the moustaches," the epithet revived by one of his descendants making our modern name of Algernon. Count Eustace of Boulogne was similarly distinguished. Fashion swung about after the Conquest, and, in the day of Henry I., Serle the bishop could compare bearded men of the Norman-English court with "filthy goats and bristly Saracens." The crusades, perhaps, were accountable for the beards which were oddly denounced as effeminate in the young courtiers of William Rufus. Not only the Greeks but the Latins in the East sometimes adopted the Saracen fashion, and the siege of Antioch (1098) was as unfavourable to the use of the razor as that of Sevastopol. When the Latins stormed the town by night, bearded knights owed their death to the assumption that every Christian would be a shaven man. But for more than four centuries diversity is allowed, beards, moustaches and shaven faces being found side by side, although now and again one fashion or another comes uppermost to be followed by those nice in such matters. Henry II. is a close-shaven king, and Richard II.'s effigy shows but a little tuft on each side of the chin, tufts which are two curled locks on the chin of Henry IV. But Henry III. is long-bearded, Edward II. curls his beard in three great ringlets, and the third Edward's long forked beard flows down his breast in patriarchal style. The mid-13th century, as seen in the drawings attributed to Matthew Paris, is an age of many full and curled beards, although the region about the lips is sometimes clipped or shaved. The beard is common in the 14th century, the forked pattern being favoured and the long drooping moustache. Amongst those who ride with him to Canterbury, Chaucer, a bearded poet, notes the merchant's "forked beard," the white beard of the franklin and the red beard of the miller, but the reeve's beard is "shave as ny as ever he can." Henry of Monmouth and his son are shaven, and thereafter beards are rare save with a few old folk until they come slowly back with the 16th century. In Ireland the statute enacted by a parliament at Trim in 1447 recited that no manner of man who will be taken for an Englishman should have beard above his mouth--the upper lip must be shaven at least every fortnight or be of equal growth with the nether lip,--and this statute remained unrepealed for nigh upon two hundred years. Henry VIII., always a law to himself, brought back the beard to favour, Stowe's annals giving 1535 as the year in which he caused his beard "to be knotted and no more shaven," his hair being polled at the same time. Many portraits give his fashion of wearing a thin moustache, whose ends met a short and squarely trimmed beard parted at the chin, a fashion in which he was followed by his brother-in-law Charles Brandon. But it is remarkable that those about him rarely imitated their most dread sovereign. While Cromwell and Howard the Admiral go clean shaven, the Seymour brothers, Denny and Russell, have the beard long and flowing. Even the forty shilling a year man, says Hooper in 1548, will waste his morning time while he sets his beard in order. About this time the clergy began to break with the long tradition of smooth faces. A priest in 1531 is commanded to abstain from wearing a beard, and Cardinal Pole, coming from the court of a bearded pope, appears bearded like a Greek patriarch. The law too, the church's kinswoman, begins to forbid, a sign of the change, and from 1542 the society of Lincoln's Inn makes rules for fining and expelling those who appear bearded at their mess, rules which the example of exalted lawyers caused to be withdrawn in 1560.

The age of Elizabeth saw lawyers, soldiers, courtiers and merchants all bearded. Her Cecils, Greshams, Raleighs, Drakes, Dudleys and Walsinghams have the beard. A shaven chin such as that seen in the portrait of Philip Howard, earl of Arundel, is rare, but the beards take a hundred fashions, and satirists and Puritan pamphleteers were busy with them and with the men who wasted hours in perfuming or starching them, in dusting them with orris powder, in curling them with irons and quills. Stubbs gives them a place amongst his abuses. "It is a world to consider how their mowchatowes must be preserved or laid out from one cheek to another and turned up like two horns towards the forehead." Of the English variety of beards Harrison has a good word: "beards of which some are shaven from the chin like those of Turks, not a few cut short like to the beard of Marquess Otto, some made round like a rubbing brush, others with a _pique de vant_ (O! fine fashion) or now and then suffered to grow long, the barbers being grown to be so cunning in this behalf as the tailors. And therefore if a man have a lean and straight face, a Marquess Otto's cut will make it broad and large; if it be platter-like, a long slender beard will make it seem the narrower; if he be weasel-becked, then much hair left on the cheeks will make the owner look big like a bowdled hen, and as grim as a goose, if Cornelis of Chelmersford say true." Nevertheless he adds that "many old men do wear no beards at all." The Elizabethan fashions continued under King James, the beard trimmed to a point being common wear; but under King Charles there is a certain reaction, and the royal style of shaving the cheeks and leaving the moustache whose points sweep upward and the chin beard like a downward flame is followed by most of the gentry. With some the beard disappears altogether or remains a mere fleck below the lip. Archbishop Laud has a cavalier-like chin tuft and upturned moustache, but Abbot his predecessor wore the spade beard, the "cathedral beard" of Randle Holme, seen in all its dignity on the Chigwell brass of Samuel Harsnett, archbishop of York (died 1631), a grim figure with his angry moustache and a long and broad beard, cut square at the bottom.

From the Restoration year the razor comes more into use. Young men shave clean. The restored king curls a few dark hairs of a moustache over each cheek, but his brother James is shaven. With the reign of Queen Anne the country enters the beardless age, and beards, moustaches and whiskers are no more seen. In the 18th century the moustache indicated a soldier from beyond sea. A Jew or a Turk was known by the beard, an appendage loathsome as comic. Matthew Robinson, the second Lord Rokeby, was indeed wearing a beard in 1798, but he was reckoned a madman therefor, and Phillips's _Public Character_ pictures him as "the only peer and perhaps the only gentleman of either Great Britain or Ireland who is thus distinguished." That George III. in his madness should have been left unshaved was a circumstance of his misery that wrung the hearts of all loyal folk. But in the very year of 1798, when Lord Rokeby's image was engraved for the curious, the Worcestershire militia officers quartered near Brighton were copying the Austrian moustache of the foreign troops, and we may note that the hair of the face, which disappeared when wigs came in, began to reappear as wigs went out. Early in the 19th century the bucks began to show a patch of whisker beside the ear, and the soldier's moustache became a common sight. Before Waterloo, guardsmen were complaining that officers of humbler regiments imitated their fashion of the moustache, and by the Waterloo year most young cavalry officers were moustached. The Horse Artillery were the next moustached corps, the rest of the army, already whiskered, following their example in the 'fifties. But for a civilian to grow a moustache was long reckoned a piece of unseemly swagger. Clive Newcome, it will be remembered, wore one until the taunting question whether he was "going in the Guards" shamed him into shaving clean. When in 1840 Mr George Frederick Muntz appeared in parliament with a full beard there were those who felt that this tall Radical had taken his own strange method of insulting English parliamentary institutions. James Ward, R.A. (d. 1859), painter of animals, was another breaker of the unwritten law, defending his beard in a pamphlet of eighteen arguments as a thing pleasing at once to the artist and to his Creator. Freedom in these matters only came when the troops were home from the Crimea, when officers who had grown beards and acquired the taste for tobacco during the long months in the trenches showed their beards and their cigars in Piccadilly. Then came the Volunteer movement, and every man was a soldier, taking a soldier's licence. The dominant fashion was the moustache, worn with long and drooping whiskers. But the "Piccadilly weepers" of the 'sixties were out of the mode for the younger men when the 'eighties began, and by the end of the century whiskers were seen in the army only upon a few veteran officers. The fashion of clean shaving had made some way, the popularity of the shaven actor having a part in this. In 1909 all modes of dealing with the hair of the face might be recognized, but the full beard had become somewhat rare in England and the full whiskers rarer still. The upper class showed an inclination to shave clean, although the army grudgingly recognized a rule which ordered the moustache to be worn. Naval men, by regulation, shaved or wore both beard and moustache, but their beards were always trimmed. Most barristers shaved the lips, although the last judge unable to hear an advocate whose voice a moustache interrupted had left the bench. Clergymen followed the lay fashions as they did under the first Stuart kings, although there was still some prejudice against the moustache as an ornament military and inappropriate. A newspaper of 1857, describing the appearance of Livingstone the missionary at a Mansion House meeting, records that he came wearing a moustache, "braving the prejudices of his countrymen and thus evincing a courage only inferior to that exhibited by him amongst the savages of Central Africa." Even as late as 1884 the _Pall Mall Gazette_ has some surprised comments on the beard of Bishop Ryle, newly consecrated to the see of Liverpool.

The footman, whose full-dress livery is the court dress of a hundred years ago, must show no more than the rudimentary whisker of the early eighteen-hundreds, and butler, coachman and groom come under the same rule. The jockey and the hunt whip are shaven likewise, but the courier has the whiskers and moustache that once marked him as a foreigner in the English milor's service, and the chauffeur, a servant with no tradition behind him, is often moustached.

Lastly, we may speak of the practice of the royal house since England came out of the beardless century. The regent took the new fashion, and sat "in whiskered state," but his brother and successor shaved clean and disliked even the hussar's moustache. The prince consort wore the moustache as a young man, adding whiskers in later years. King Edward VII. wore moustache and trimmed beard, and his heir apparent also followed the fashion of many fellow admirals. (O. Ba.)

BEARDSLEY, AUBREY VINCENT (1872-1898), English artist in black and white, was born at Brighton on the 24th of August 1872. In 1883 his family settled in London, and in the following year he appeared in public as an "infant musical phenomenon," playing at several concerts with his sister. In 1888 he obtained a post in an architect's office, and afterwards one in the Guardian Life and Fire Insurance Company (1889). In 1891, under the advice of Sir Edward Burne-Jones and Puvis de Chavannes, he took up art as a profession. In 1892 he attended the classes at the Westminster School of Art, then under Professor Brown; and from 1893 until his death, at Mentone, on the 16th of March 1898, his work came continually before the public, arousing a storm of criticism and much hostile feeling. Beardsley had an unswerving tendency towards the fantastic of the gloomier and "unwholesome" sort. His treatment of most subjects was revolutionary; he deliberately ignored proportion and perspective, and the "freedom from convention" which he displayed caused his work to be judged with harshness. In certain phases of technique he especially excelled; and his earlier methods of dealing with the single line in conjunction with masses of black are in their way unsurpassed, except in the art of Japan, the country which probably gave his ideas some assistance. He was always an ornamentist, rather than an illustrator; and his work must be judged from that point of view. His frontispiece to _Volpone_ is held by some to be, from this purely technical standpoint, one of the best pen-drawings of the age. His posters for the Avenue theatre and for Mr Fisher Unwin were among the first of the modern cult of that art.

The following are the chief works which are illustrated with drawings by Beardsley: the _Bon Mot_ Library, _The Pall Mall Budget_, and _The Studio_ (1893), Sir Thomas Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_ (1893-1894), _Salome_ (1894), _The Yellow Book_ (1894-1895), _The Savoy Magazine_ (1896), _The Rape of the Lock_ (1896).

See also J. Pennell, _The Studio_ (1893); Symons, _Aubrey Beardsley_ (1898); R. Ross, _Volpone_ (1898); H.C. Marillier, _The Early Work of Aubrey Beardsley_ (1899); Smithers, _Reproductions of Drawings by Aubrey Beardsley_; John Lane, _The Later Works of Aubrey Beardsley_ (1901); R. Ross, _Aubrey Beardsley_ (1908). (E. F. S.)

BEARDSTOWN, a city of Cass county, Illinois, U.S.A., in the W. part of the state, on the E. bank of the Illinois river, about 111 m. N. of St Louis, Missouri. It is served by the Baltimore & Ohio South-Western, and the Burlington (Chicago, Burlington & Quincy) railways, and by steamboats plying between it and St. Louis. Pop. (1890) 4226; (1900) 4827 (444 foreign-born); (1910) 6107. The industrial establishments of the city include flour, planing and saw mills, the machine shops (of the St Louis division) of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy railway, ice factories, pearl button factories and a shoe factory. The fishing interests are also important. Beardstown was laid out in 1827 and was incorporated as a city in 1896. It was named in honour of Thomas Beard, who settled in the vicinity in 1820. During the Black Hawk War (1832) it was a base of supplies for the Illinois troops. The old court house in which Abraham Lincoln, in 1854, won his famous "Armstrong murder case," is now used for a city hall.

BEARER, strictly "one who carries," a term used in India for a palanquin-bearer, and now especially for a body-servant. The term is also used in connexion with military ambulances, and "bearer" companies formed part of the Royal Army Medical Corps until amalgamated with the field-hospitals to form field-ambulances (1905). In banking and commerce the word is applied to the holder or presenter of a cheque or draft not made payable to a specific person; it has also a technical use, as in printing, of anything that supports pressure in machinery, &c.

BEARINGS. In engineering a "bearing" is that particular kind of support which, besides carrying the load imposed upon it by the shaft associated with it, allows the shaft freedom to revolve. Or, put in another way, a bearing forms with the shaft a pair of elements having one degree of freedom to turn relatively to one another about their common axis. The part of the shaft in the bearing is commonly called the _journal_. The component parts of a small bearing, pillow block, plummer block or pedestal, as it is variously styled, are illustrated in fig. 1, and these parts, put together, are further illustrated in fig. 2 with the shaft added. Corresponding parts are similarly lettered in the two illustrations. The shaft (S) is encircled by the _brasses_ (B1 and B2) made of gun metal, phosphor bronze or other suitable material. The lower brass fits into the main casting (A) in the semicircular seat provided for it, and is prevented from moving endways by the flanges (F, F) and from turning with the shaft by the projections (P, P), which fit into corresponding recesses in the casting (A), one of which is shown at p. After the shaft has been placed in position, the upper brass (B2) and the cap (C) are put on and both are held in place by the bolts (Q1, Q2). The brasses are bedded into the main casting (A) and the cap (C) respectively at the surfaces D, D, D, D. The complete bearing is held to the framework of the machine by bolts (R1, R2) passing through holes (H, H) which are slotted to allow endwise adjustment of the whole bearing in order to facilitate the alignment of the shaft. Oil or other lubricant is introduced through the hole (G), and it passes through the top brass to grooves or oilways cut into the surface of the brass for the purpose of distributing the oil uniformly to the journal.

[Illustration: FIG. 1.]

Some form of lubricator is usually fitted at G in order to supply oil to the bearing continuously. A form of lubricator used for this purpose is shown in place, fig. 2, and an enlarged section is shown in fig. 3. It will be seen that the lubricator consists essentially of a cup the base of which is pierced centrally by a tube which reaches to within a small distance of the lid of the cup inside, and projects into the oilway leading to the journal outside. The annular space round the tube inside is filled with oil which is transferred to the central tube and thence to the bearing by the capillary action of a cotton wick thrust down on a piece of wire. It is only necessary to withdraw the wick from the central tube to stop the supply of oil. The lubricator is fitted through a hole in the lid which is usually plugged with a piece of cane or closed by more elaborate means. A line of shafting would be supported by several bearings of the kind illustrated, themselves supported by brackets projecting from or rigidly fixed to the walls of the workshop, or on frames resting on the floor, or on hangers attached to the roof girders or principals.

[Illustration: FIG. 2.]

[Illustration: FIG. 3.]

In bearings of modern design for supporting a line shaft the general arrangement shown in fig. 1 is modified so that the alignments of the shaft can be made both vertically or horizontally by means of adjusting screws, and the brass is jointed with the supporting main body so that it is free to follow the small deflections of the shaft which take place when the shaft is working. Another modern improvement is the formation of an oil reservoir or well in the base of the bearing itself, and the transference of the oil from this well to the shaft by means of one or two rings riding loosely on the shaft. The bottom part of the ring dips into the oil contained in the well of the bearing and, as the shaft rotates, the ring rolls on the shaft and thus carries oil up to the shaft continuously, from which it finds its way to the surfaces of the shaft and bearing in contact. It should be understood that the upper brass is slotted crossways to allow the ring to rest on the shaft. When the direction of the load carried by the bearing is constant it is unnecessary to provide more than one brass, and the construction is modified accordingly. Figs. 4 and 5 show an axle box used for goods wagons on the Great Eastern railway, and they also illustrate the method of pad lubrication in general use for this kind of bearing. The main casting, A, is now uppermost, and is designed so that the upper part supports and constrains the spring buckle through which the load W is transmitted to the bearing, and the lower part inside is arranged to support the brass, B. The brass is jointed freely with the main casting by means of a hemispherical hump resting in a corresponding recess in the casting. What may be called the cap, C, forms the lower part of the axle box, but instead of supporting a second brass it is formed into an oil reservoir in which is arranged a pad of cotton wick woven on a tin frame. The upper part of the pad is formed into a kind of brush, shaped to fit the underside of the journal, whilst the lower part consists of streamers of wick resting in the oil. The oil is fed to the brush by the capillary action of the streamers. The reservoirs are filled with oil through the apertures P and O. The bottom cap is held in position by the T-headed bolts Q1 and Q2 (fig. 5). By slackening the nuts and turning the T-heads fair with the slots in the cap, the cap comes right away and the axle may be examined. A leather ring L is fitted as shown to prevent dust from entering the axle box.

[Illustration: FIG. 4.]

[Illustration: FIG. 5.]

_Footsteps._--A bearing arranged to support the lower end of a vertical shaft is called a footstep, sometimes a pivot bearing. A simple form of footstep is shown in fig 6. A casting A, designed so that it can be conveniently bolted to a foundation block, cross beam, or bracket is bored out and fitted with a brass B, which is turned inside to carry the end of the shaft S. The whole vertical load on the shaft is carried by the footstep, so that it is important to arrange efficient lubricating apparatus. Results of experiments made on a footstep, reported in _Proc. Inst. Mech. Eng._, 1891, show that if a diametral groove be cut in the brass, as indicated at g (fig 6), and if the oil is led to the centre of this groove by a channel c communicating with the exterior, the rotation of the shaft draws in a plentiful supply of oil which radiates from the centre and makes its way vertically between the shaft and the brass and finally overflows at the top of the brass. The overflowing oil may be led away and may be re-introduced into the footsteps at c. The rotation of the shaft thus causes a continuous circulation of oil through the footstep. One experiment from the report mentioned above may be quoted. A 3-in. shaft, revolving 128 times per minute and supported on a manganese bronze bearing lubricated in the way explained above sustained increasing loads until, at a load of 300 pounds per square inch of the area of the end of the shaft, it seized. The mechanical details of a footstep may be varied for purposes of adjustment in a variety of ways similarly to the variations of a common bearing already explained.

[Illustration: FIG. 6.]