Women belonging to the Third Order of St Francis, when they started creating communities, did not lose their right to possess property. These communities grew out of very small groups of women who bought or built small houses for themselves in the vicinity of a Franciscan church; and the plots occupied by these houses (in growing number) came to be treated as Church possession, and to be surrounded by a common wall (rather like beguinages) and called convents. They were often very chaotic and haphazard as to architecture. Some of them, after a fire or two, were about A. D. 1600 no longer habitable. At that time, the Council of Trent having imposed the law of common property on all the religious institutes, and strict enclosure on the women’s ones, the form of one building rather than that o f a cluster of small houses came to be considered as the right one for a convent. So the rebuilding of the old, as well as the building of new convents (as many as eleven were founded between 1600 and 1650, which doubled the number of the Franciscan women’s convents in the country) needed rich founders who could afford such expense. These, however, could be found at the time, and the Franciscan convents soon took the form of the monastic ones. In spite, however, of the common property and of the enclosure, it was remembered that members of the Third Order had not been originally nuns but secular women, and they were allowed to keep their right to possess property, although they could not dispose of it without their Superiors’ control. Now in some of these convents (but only in those that had started in the Middle Ages, never in the newest ones) the tradition of separate little houses was not entirely lost; a few such houses were built on the convent premises, and they were inhabited and disposed of (in their owners’ last will) with all the necessary permissions which were never denied. From two convents (one in Cracow and one in Vilnius) we have however information about uncontrolled disposing, sometimes even of nuns passing or selling their houses to secular people (who were then entitled to collect a rent from the religious inhabitants of such houses). This, and only this, was considered unlawful.