IV. The Friars
The friars differed from the monks in certain ways. The brethren by their profession were bound, not to any locality or house, but to the province, which usually consisted of the entire number of houses in a country. They did not, consequently, form individual families in their various establishments, like the monks in their monasteries. They also, at first, professed the strictest poverty, not being allowed to possess even corporate property like the monastic Orders. They were by their profession mendicants, living on alms, and only holding the mere buildings in which they dwelt.
i. The Dominicans, or Black Friars
The founder of these friars was a Spaniard named Dominic, a canon of the diocese of Osma, in Old Castile, at the close of the twelfth century. They were known as Dominicans, from their founder; “Preaching Friars,” from their mission to convert heretics; in England, “Black Friars,” from the colour of their cloak; and in France “Jacobins,” from having had their first house in the Rue St. Jacques, at Paris. Their rule was founded on that of St. Augustine, and it was verbally approved in the Council of Lateran in A.D. 1215, and the following year formally by Honorius III. Their founder, having been a secular canon of Osma in Spain, his friars at first adopted the ordinary dress of canons; but about A.D. 1219 they took a white tunic, scapular, and hood, over which, when in church or when they went abroad, they wore a black cappa, or cloak, with a hood of the same colour. They first came to England with Peter de Rupibus, bishop of Winchester, in A.D. 1221, and their Order quickly spread. In the first year of their arrival they obtained a foothold in the University of Oxford, and at the time of the general suppression of the religious Orders in the sixteenth century they had fifty-eight convents in the country.
KNIGHT TEMPLAR
