in a monastic sense, are lay-friars, or brothers, admitted for the service of the house, but without orders, and not allowed to sing in the choir. Till the eleventh century the word was used to signify persons who had embraced the monkish life at the age of discretion; by which they were distinguished from those devoted in their childhood by their parents, and called oblati. But in the eleventh century, when illiterate persons, incapable of being clerks, and only destined for bodily labour, began to be received into monasteries, the signification of the word was necessarily changed. According to Mabillon, it was John, first abbot of Vallombrosa, who primarily introduced these brother converts, distinguished from their state by the monks of the choir, who were then either clerks or capable of becoming so.