31/08/2026
The British establishment tried hard to change and control us Irish but thankfully we Irish have found more freedom. Still a little section in the North to hopefully get back before too long by peaceful referendum.
โ๏ธ In 1537 the Irish parliament passed a law about haircuts, and it was not a joke. Wearing your hair a certain way had become a political act.
The style was the glib. A thick heavy fringe of hair grown long over the forehead and eyes, worn by Gaelic Irish men, and it appears again and again in English accounts of Ireland with a distinct note of irritation attached. ๐งต
The irritation had a reason. English observers complained that a man could push a glib forward or cut it off and be effectively unrecognisable, which made identifying somebody wanted for something extremely difficult. Whether that was truly the purpose or simply how it looked from outside is arguable, but the belief was firmly held and it was written down repeatedly.
So it went into legislation. The Act for the English Order, Habit and Language set out to make the population look and sound English, and it named the glib specifically, along with long hair worn at the back, the woollen mantle worn as an outer garment, and the Irish language itself. Hair, clothing and speech, treated together as one problem.
That is the piece worth sitting with. A government does not legislate against a hairstyle because it dislikes the hairstyle. It does it because everyone involved understands the hair is not really the subject. โ๏ธ
