If you’ve studied Ben Affleck’s career for more than five or six seconds, you’ll have noticed something striking. It’s all about the beard. Affleck’s progress from next big thing to actual big thing has taken 15 years: from Good Will Hunting in 1997, through a very long period in the Hollywood wilderness, before, at long last, his directorial triumph with Argo.

The crucial factor? Easy. Since last year Affleck has covered his face in a fine, luxurious beard. The correlation is undeniable. Youthful chin-strap: Chasing Amy. Baby-faced Bic boy: Gigli. Hint of beard: Gone Baby Gone. Full bear-face: Argo, Baftas and Golden Globes. You do the maths. Affleck is clear evidence that a beard is the key to success, power and public acclaim in the 21st century.

He is not the only one to have noticed. This month’s Bafta and Grammy red carpets fairly bristled with beards. From Bradley Cooper to Hugh Jackman; from the blond one out of Mumford & Sons to all three brown-haired ones out of Mumford & Sons: everyone is sprouting.

Where has this come from? Well, most immediately, beard-wearing has broken out of the hipster ghetto. Walk around the trendiest district of any Western city today and you’ll see the same style. Short hair (or no hair), neck tattoos and a beard the size of a bee’s nest. I have observed this most noticeably in Los Angeles (which explains where Affleck got the idea). Here, serious commitment demands completing the “Rasputin with a MacBook” look by losing a few teeth.

Now, everyone knows that hipsters are annoying and fatuous. But they are also creative and ambitious, scarily cool and certainly less of a force for social evil than, say, bankers. You don’t see many bankers with beards, which is probably one of the reasons why they managed to crash the world economy a few years back. (Although I should note that this trend may be about to change: City watchers know that since Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Bankfein returned from Davos he has been squeezing out a rather Clooney-ish patch of salt-and-pepper fur on his lower jaw. There may be hope after all.)

But of course, like everything else, beard-wearing for success is not new. Indeed, a bit of historical research tells us that the argument linking the size of your beard with your worth as a man has gone on for centuries.

Some time during the middle of the 12th century a writer named Burchardus, who was the Abbot of Bellevaux, wrote a long treatise in defence of beards. This rather went against the monastic wisdom of his age, which favoured shaving among the brethren, but his arguments were powerful and timeless.

The beard, wrote Burchardus, is a sign of God’s grace. It distinguishes man from woman, and is also a sign of male virility, energy and strength. Burchardus quotes a popular idiom of his day, uttered to describe a lusty young man: barbatus homo est. There’s a faint pun here, I think: the Latin can suggest “that guy’s beardy” but also “that guy is a beardy”. The facial hair is not just a signifier of manliness: it is the manliness. Today’s corresponding idiom would probably translate as barba femina est: “that girl’s a beard”. Which suggests something a bit different, although I suppose a man’s perceived virility is still involved.

I have no doubt that Burchardus was onto something. If we look at the history of England since the Norman Conquest, there is a very strong correlation between general beardiness and national prosperity. Between 1066 and about 1400 most men had a beard, and aside from a few nasties — Black Death, Peasants’ Revolt, perpetual warfare, and so on — this realm developed pretty nicely.

Then in the early 15th century Henry V, the greatest medieval warrior and certainly the paragon for kingship in his age, bucked the trend: his portrait shows him wearing his hair in a sort of under-clippered pudding bowl, but with cheeks and chin as smooth as an ostrich egg. This worked for Henry, most notably at Agincourt in 1415. But the trend he set was fatal.

Henry V’s successors Henry VI and Edward IV both appear in portraits with smooth chins, as do Richard III and Henry VII. What connects these four monarchs? They were the principal antagonists in the Wars of the Roses, or as I am going to rechristen them in my new book, the Wars of the Rosy Cheeked Namby-Pambies. You will have noticed a total silence on the matter of beards from all the swivel-eyed members of the Richard III Society who have been trying to rescue their hero’s reputation since it was confirmed last week that the skeleton dug up in Leicester was his. That is because while the case for baldy-face Richard murdering the Princes in the Tower etc is at least debatable, the argument that he brought shame on the clean-shaven is emphatically not.

I had lunch this week with my friend Dr Suzannah Lipscomb, the distinguished Tudor historian, who tells me that this theory holds pretty well for the Tudor years. During the early 16th century, wearing a beard once again became a direct signifier of virility among laymen and godliness among Protestant churchmen — a form of proxy cock-waving on the face, if you like. Portrait research has shown that during the Tudor years — the crucible of the modernity — beard-wearing men outnumbered the clean-shaven by 10 to one. This pattern only changed during the mid-17th century, when everyone concentrated on their head-hair rather than their face-hair, and England collapsed back into disastrous civil war. Coincidence? I think not.

Anyway, having said all this, I must now admit something terrible. I can’t grow a proper beard. I get a dense gingerish, pubey sprouting all over my jawline and neck and upper lip, but can cultivate no more than a few wispy wool-strands on my cheeks. It’s a source of some discomfort to know that this means I will probably never win a Bafta, run a bank or fit in at a party in Shoreditch. Do they do beard implants yet? If so, I’m first in line for an “Affleck”.

Dan Jones is author of The Plantagenets: The Kings Who Made England (Harper Press), which features a lot of beards