=Source.=--William of Malmesbury, _De gestis regum Anglorum_, ed.
Stubbs, vol. ii., pp. 369, 530. (Rolls Series.)
Flowing hair was then in vogue, and extravagance of dress; and the
fashion of shoes with curved points was then adopted; it was the
ambition of the young gallants to rival women in suppleness of limb, in
mincing gait, in easy gesture and uncovered bust. Effeminate and soft,
they refused to be what birth had made them.
In the twenty-ninth year (of Henry I.) an event occurred in England
which may appear strange to our long-haired dandies, who forget their
sex and eagerly ape the fashions of women. An English knight, who was
proud of his luxuriant hair, was terrified by the pricks of conscience
into a dream, in which he thought a man was strangling him with his own
locks. Shaken out of his sleep, he straightway cut off his too abundant
curls. The fashion spread throughout England, and, since a recent shock
commonly stirs the feelings, almost all knights tolerated without ado
the reasonable cropping of their hair. But this decency did not last
long; scarcely had a year passed, when all who claimed to be men of
court lapsed to their earlier vice; they vied with women in the length
of their hair, and when they had little, they wore false; forgetful, or
rather ignorant, of the saying of the apostle, “If a man have long hair
it is a shame unto him.”