CARMELITES,.. 
547 . 
and put them under the jurisdiction of the bishops. There was 
scarcely a, town in the Low Countries, in which there was in t a 
society of Beguines, and even at Amsterdam there was a flourish- 
ing one. 
. These societies consisted of several houses placed in one enclosure, 
with one or more churches, according to the number of Beguiues. 
There was in every house a prioress or mistress, without whose leave 
they durst not stir out. They made a sort of vow in the followng terms 
J promise to be obedient and chaste as long as 1 continue in this Begui- 
nage.” They observed a three years’ noviciate, before they took the 
habit. The rector of the parish is superior of the Begiiiiiage ; and 
he does nothing w'ithout the advice of eight Beguines. They were 
formerly habited in different manners, some in gray, others in blue ; 
but of late they all wore black. When they went abroad in Amster- 
dam, they put on a black vejl. Formerly they had as niapy different 
statues as there were societies. In the visitations of the year 1600 
and 1601, by the archbishop Matthias Hovius, they were forbidden, 
under the penalty of a fine, to have lap-dogs. 
Carmelites 
A TRIBE of mendicant friars, so named from mount Carmel. They 
pretend to descend in an uninterrupted succession from Elijah, Elisha, 
and the sons of the prophets. The manner in which they make out 
their antiquity is too ridiculous to he rehearsed. Some pretend they 
are descendants of Jesus Christ; otliers make Pythagoras a Carme 
lite, and the ancient Druids regular branches of their order. 
Thocas, a Greek monk, speaks the most reasonably. He says, 
that in his time (1185) Elias’s cave was still extant on the mountain ; 
near w hich were the remains of a building, which intimated that there 
had been anciently a monastery ; that some years before, an old monk, 
a priest of Calabria, by revelation, as he pretended, from the prophet 
Elias, fixed there, and assembled ten brothers. In 1709, Albert, 
patriarch of Jerusalem, gave tliese solitaires a rigid rule, which Papele- 
roch has since printed. In 1217, or, according to others, 1226, pope 
Honorius III. approved Rnd confirmed it. This rule contained six- 
teen articles. These confined them to their cells, enjoined them to 
continue day and night in prayer; prohibited their having any pro- 
perty ; enjoined fasting from the feast of the Holy Cross till Easter, 
except on Sundays; abstinence at all times from fiesh; obliged them 
to manual labour ; imposed a strict silence on them from vespers till 
the tierce the next day, &c. 
The peace concluded by the emperor Frederic II. with the Sara- 
cens, in 1229, occasioned the Carmelites to quit the Holy Land, under 
Alan V. general of the order. He first sent some of the religious to 
Cyprus, who landed there in 1238, and founded a monastery in the 
forest of Fontania. Some Sicilians ai the same time leaving mount 
Carmel, returned to their owm country, where they founded a monas- 
tery in the suburbs of Messina. Some English monks departed out 
of Syria, in 1240, to found others in England. Others of Provence, 
in 1244, founded a monastery in the desert of Aignalates, a league 
