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 BEAR-LEADER, formerly a man who led bears about the country. In the middle ages and Tudor times these animals were chiefly used in the brutal sport of bear-baiting and were led from village to village. Performing bears were also common, and are even still sometimes seen perambulating the country with their keepers, generally Frenchmen or Italians. The phrase “bear-leader” has now come colloquially to mean a tutor or guardian, who escorts any lad of rank or wealth on his travels.  BÉARN, formerly a small frontier province in the south of France, now included within the department of Basses-Pyrénées. It was bounded on the W. by Soule and Lower Navarre, on the N. by Chalosse, Tursan and Astarac, E. by Bigorre and S. by the Pyrénées. Its name can be traced back to the town of Beneharnum (Lescar). The civitas Beneharnensium was included in the Novempopulania. It was conquered by the Vascones in the 6th century, and in 819 became a viscounty dependent on the dukes of Aquitaine—a feudal link which was broken in the 11th century, when the viscounts ceased to acknowledge any suzerain. They then reigned over the two dioceses of Lescar and Oloron; but their capital was Morlaas, where they had a mint which was famous throughout the middle ages. In the 13th century Gaston VII., of the Catalonian house of Moncade, made Orthez his seat of government. His long reign (1229–1290) was a perpetual struggle with the kings of France and England, each anxious to assert his suzerainty over Béarn. As Gaston left only daughters, the viscounty passed at his death to the family of Foix, from whom it was transmitted through the houses of Grailly and Albret to the Bourbons, and they, in the person of Henry IV., king of Navarre, made it an apanage of the crown of France. It was not formally incorporated in the royal domains, however, until 1620. None of these political changes weakened the independent spirit of the Béarnais. From the 11th century onward, they were governed by their own special customs or fors. These were drawn up in the language of the country, a Romance dialect (1288 being the date of the most ancient written code), and are remarkable for the manner in which they define the rights of the sovereign, determining the reciprocal obligations of the viscount and his subjects or vassals. Moreover, from the 12th century Béarn enjoyed a kind of representative government, with cours plénières composed of deputies from the three estates. From 1220 onward, the judiciary powers of these assemblies were exercised by a cour majour of twelve barons jurats charged with the duty of maintaining the integrity of the fors. When Gaston-Phoebus wished to establish a regular annual hearth-tax (fouage) in the viscounty, he convoked the deputies of the three estates in assemblies called états. These soon acquired extensive political and financial powers, which continued in operation till 1789. Although, when Béarn was annexed to the domains of the crown, it was granted a conseil d’état and a parlement, which sat at Pau, the province also retained its fors until the Revolution.

 BEAS or, a river of India. The Beas, which was the Hyphasis of the Greeks, is one of the Five Rivers of the Punjab. It issues in the snowy mountains of Kulu at an altitude of 13,326 ft. above sea-level, flows through the Kangra valley and the plains of the Punjab, and finally joins the Sutlej after a course of 290 m. It is crossed by a railway bridge near Jullundur.

 BEAT (a word common in various forms to the Teutonic languages; it is connected with the similar Romanic words derived from the Late Lat. battere), a blow or stroke; from the many applications of the verb “to beat” come various meanings of the substantive, in some of which the primary sense has become obscure. It is applied to the throbbing of the pulse or heart, to the beating of a drum, either for retreat, or charge, or to quarters; in music to the alternating sound produced by the striking together of two notes not exactly of the same pitch (see ), and also to the movement of the baton by which a conductor of an orchestra or chorus indicates the time, and to the divisions of a bar. As a nautical term, a “beat” is the zigzag course taken by a ship in sailing against the wind. The application of the word to a policeman’s or sentry’s round comes either from beating a covert for game and hence the term means an exhaustive search of a district, or from the repeated strokes of the foot in constantly walking up and down. In this sense the word is used in America, particularly in Alabama and Mississippi, of a voting precinct.

 BEATIFICATION (from the Lat. beatus, happy, blessed, and facere, to make), the act of making blessed; in the Roman Catholic Church, a stage in the process of (q.v.).

 BEATON (or ), DAVID, (c. 1494–1546), Scottish cardinal and archbishop of St Andrews, was a younger son of John Beaton of Balfour in the county of Fife, and is said to have been born in the year 1494. He was educated at the universities of St Andrews and Glasgow, and in his sixteenth year was sent to Paris, where he studied civil and canon law. About this time he was presented to the rectory of Campsie by his uncle James Beaton, then archbishop of Glasgow. When James Beaton was translated to St Andrews in 1522 he resigned the rich abbacy of Arbroath in his nephew’s favour, under reservation of one half of the revenues to himself during his lifetime. The great ability of Beaton and the patronage of his uncle ensured his rapid promotion to high offices in the church and kingdom. He was sent by King James V. on various missions to France, and in 1528 was appointed keeper of the privy seal. He took a leading part in the negotiations connected with the king’s marriages, first with Madeleine of France, and afterwards with Mary of Guise. At the French court he was held in high estimation by King Francis I., and was consecrated bishop of Mirepoix in Languedoc in December 1537. On the 20th of December 1538 he was appointed a cardinal priest by Pope Paul III., under the title of St Stephen in the Coelian Hill. He was the only Scotsman who had been named to that high office by an undisputed right, Cardinal Wardlaw, bishop of Glasgow, having received his appointment from the anti-pope Clement VII. On the death of Archbishop James Beaton in 1539, the cardinal was raised to the primatial see of Scotland.

Beaton was one of King James’s most trusted advisers, and it was mainly due to his influence that the king drew closer the French alliance and refused Henry VIII.’s overtures to follow him in his religious policy. On the death of James in December 1542 he attempted to assume office as one of the regents for the infant sovereign Mary, founding his pretensions on an alleged will of the late king; but his claims were disregarded, and the earl of Arran, head of the great house of Hamilton, and next heir to the throne, was declared regent by the estates. The cardinal was, by order of the regent, committed to the custody of Lord Seaton; but his imprisonment was merely nominal, and he was soon again at liberty and at the head of the party opposed to the English alliance. Arran too was soon won over to his views, dismissed the preachers by whom he had been surrounded, and joined the cardinal at Stirling, where in September 1543 Beaton crowned the young queen. In the same year he was raised to the office of chancellor of Scotland, and was appointed protonotary apostolic and legate a latere by the pope. Had Beaton confined himself to secular politics, his strenuous opposition to the plans of Henry VIII. for the subjugation of Scotland would have earned him the lasting gratitude of his countrymen. Unfortunately politics were inextricably interwoven with the religious controversies of the time, and resistance to English influence involved resistance to