All of them, besides, are oppressed with a numerous race of mendicant friars, whose beggary being not only licensed but consecrated by religion, is a most grievous tax upon the poor people, who are most carefully taught that it is a duty to give, and a very great sin to refuse them their charity.

The mendicant orders derive their whole subsistence from such oblations.

The mendicant orders are like those teachers whose subsistence depends altogether upon their industry.

The establishment of the two great mendicant orders of St Dominic and St. Francis, it is observed by Machiavel, revived, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the languishing faith and devotion of the catholic church.

Among my headings under this one twelve months I find an account of the adventure of the Paradol Chamber, of the Amateur Mendicant Society, who held a luxurious club in the lower vault of a furniture warehouse, of the facts connected with the loss of the British barque "Sophy Anderson", of the singular adventures of the Grice Patersons in the island of Uffa, and finally of the Camberwell poisoning case.

T. Wolpers, in his Heiligen legende in 1964, allowed the possibility of either Benedictines or Cistercians, but found the evidence strongest for a mendicant origin, presumably intended for preaching to a lay audience.

A friar, or occasionally fray, is a man who is a member of a mendicant religious order in Catholic Christianity.

In the Roman Catholic Church, there are two classes of orders known as friars, or mendicant orders: the four "great orders" and the so-called "lesser orders".