The Etymology of Mendicant
Mendicant takes a strikingly bleak view of beggary in its etymology. The Latin source is mendīcāre (to beg), formed from mendīcus (a beggar), itself from mendum (a defect, fault, blemish). The underlying idea: a beggar is one whose physical defect or social flaw obliges him to ask for alms. English borrowed the participle mendīcāns as the adjective mendicant in the late 14th century. By that point the word had a very specific institutional meaning. The 13th century had seen the rise of the Mendicant Orders — the Franciscans (founded 1209), the Dominicans (1216), the Carmelites, and the Augustinians — friars who, unlike traditional monks, lived not on monastic estates but on alms collected by walking and preaching. Mendicant friar became a technical term in canon law and church history. The same Latin mendum produces, somewhat paradoxically, the English verbs mend (to repair a defect) and amend (to remove a fault from a text or law).