AUGUSTINIAN HERMITS or FRIARS, a religious order in the Roman Catholic Church, sometimes (but improperly) called Black Friars (see FRIARS). In the first half of the 13th century there were in central Italy various small congregations of hermits living according to different rules. The need of co ordinating and organizing these hermits induced the popes towards 12 5o to unite into one body a number of these congregations, so as to form a single religious order, living according to the Rule of St. Augustine, and called the Order of Augustinian Hermits, or simply the Augustinian Order. Special constitutions were drawn up for its government, on the same lines as the Dominicans and other mendicants—a General elected by chapter, provincials to rule in the different countries, with assistants, definitors and visitors. For this reason, and because almost from the beginning the term "hermits" became a misnomer (for they abandoned the deserts and lived conventually in towns), they ranked among the friars, and became the fourth of the mendicant orders.
The reaction against the inevitable tendencies towards mitiga tion and relaxation led to a number of reforms that produced upwards of 20 different congregations within the order, each governed by a vicar-general, who was subject to the General of the order.
About 15oo a great attempt at a reform of this kind was set on foot among the Augustinian Hermits of northern Germany, and they were formed into a separate congregation independent of the general. It was from this congregation that Luther went forth, and great numbers of the German Augustinian Hermits, among them Wenceslaus Link the provincial, followed him and embraced the Reformation, so that the congregation was dis solved in 1526. The Reformation and later revolutions have de stroyed most of the houses of Augustinian Hermits, so that now only about ioo exist in various parts of Europe and America; in Ireland they are relatively numerous, having survived the penal times. (See AUGUSTINIAN CANONS.)