It is said that they controlled Ashridge Priory and Edington Priory in England, but this has been completely repudiated in an article by Richard Emory in the journal Speculum (1943), who attributes the original connection to Helyot's Dictionnaire des Ordres Religieux, which was compiled in Paris between the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
After spending his youth in study, he entered, in his twenty-fourth year, the friary of the Third Order Regular of St. Francis, founded in Picpus-—now part of Paris—-by his uncle, Jérôme Hélyot, a canon regular of the Order of the Holy Sepulcher.