Back to the Middle Ages?

With social distancing and lockdown measures around the world to combat the spread of COVID19 we shall, I suppose, all be letting our hair grow long for quite some time. 

André Malraux, in the first section of Les Noyers de l’Altenburg (The Walnut Trees of Altenberg) writes of life in the Chartres transit camp (Durchgangslager, or Dulag) for French prisoners of war. “Dès les premiers temps de la guerre, dès l’uniforme eut effacé le métier, j’ai commencé d’entrevoir ces faces gothiques. Et que ci sourd aujourd’hui de la foule hagarde qui ne peut plus se raser n’est pas le bagne, c’est le moyen-âge.”

“In the earliest days of the war, as soon as his uniform had blotted out a man’s profession, I began to see these Gothic faces. And what now emerges from the wild crowd that can no longer shave is not the penal settlement, but the Middle Ages.”  (p.23 of the 1989 translation by A. W. Fielding)

But throughout Europe in the Middle Ages hair length was generally a sign of social status. So Malraux’s idea of the Middle Ages is, like everyone’s, skewed towards those figures who were depicted, who were of course overwhelmingly from the social layer of patronage and benefactors. 

Sumptuary laws in mid thirteenth-century Bavaria decreed that peasants had to cut their hair to their ears. In Wernher der Gartenaere’s poem Meier Helmbrecht, the eponymous hero, the son of an estate manager, after coming across the a splendidly embroidered hood, takes it into his head that work on the farmland is not for him; his family manage to buy him a horse, some armour and a sword, so he can join the service of a knight, and he grows his hair long. The poem portrays the decline of chivalry and the knights are merely a band of robbers. Helmbrecht spends a year travelling around looting and murdering, but homesickness leads him to return home. He greets his family with bad snippets of court French, Czech, and ecclesiastical Latin, showing off his new knowledge. He is arrogant, and gives stolen goods to his family. His father tries to dissuade him from returning to the robber band, but he misses the adventure, and the ‘better life’ they offer. Things go bad when after a series of robberies to fund the celebration of an arranged marriage between Helmbrecht’s sister and one of the gang, the robbers are caught at the wedding breakfast and they are all hanged, except for Helmbrecht who is pardoned according to the custom of freeing one in ten, however his eyes are gouged out and a foot and a hand are chopped off. Helmbrecht returns home but is turned away by his father, and is finally set upon by a five farmers whose lands he had previously looted and whose families he had murdered.  In his punishments Helmbrecht’s long hair is torn out in a show of class hatred.

Short hair was often regarded as a sign of servitude, and was a sign of the humility of monks. In the eleventh century Norman soldiers wore their hair short, so that in 1066 King Harold's scouts mistakenly reported back that the invading army almost entirely consisted of priests. 

Further reading: Robert Bartlett’s ‘Symbolic Meanings of Hair in the Middle Ages’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 4 (1994), pp. 43-60) and Middle High German text of Meier Helmbrecht.