ABSTRACT
The network of mendicant orders was one of the institutions that were present all over late medieval Europe. The density of the monastic network in Western European regions, for instance England, suggests that these networks were established in accordance with an earlier, much higher population number. The time limit for using monastic networks in the study of demographic and economic questions is the reformation whereby the confessional fragmentation led to the disintegration of coherent monastic networks too. The mendicant communities depended on the society surrounding them: not only on their goodwill towards the friars, but maybe even more so on their economic capacities to sustain them. Certain types of mendicant communities were usually larger: for the Dominicans and the Franciscan observants the average number of friars was around 20. The Austin Hermits and the Carmelites were fewer in number in their houses, and the smallest communities sometimes no more than four to six hermits lived in the Pauline monasteries.
