An early Franciscan, writing when controversies from within and from without were agitating his order, compared the two original bodies of friars to the twin brothers Jacob and Esau, whose quarrels began while they were yet in the womb of their mother. The comparison has become a commonplace, and the black friars, by tacitly assuming the name and rôle of Jacob, may perhaps be said to have given an excuse to the historian for treating the Friars Minor as the firstborn. Actually, indeed, Dominic was the senior to Francis by more than ten years, and though his order came formally into being only in the year of the Lateran Council, when the Friars Minor also received approval, he had been for many years the leader of a group of priests dedicated to combating heresy, and the Friars Preachers were in England three years before the Franciscans came. Nevertheless, the life history of Francis, and the peculiarly vivid and vivifying quality of the new blood with which he enriched the veins of Europe, make it inevitable that he should take precedence of Dominic in any general account of the religious renaissance in which both shared, and though it may well be argued that in course of time the life and institutions of the grey friars were profoundly modified by the influence of the black, it is all but unquestionable that the Dominicans changed their style of canons for that of friars owing to the example of Francis.