Walter Hilton

Life

Walter Hilton was born about 1340–1345. Writing centuries later, an early 16th-century Carthusian, James Grenehalgh of Lancashire, referred to Hilton as a mystic coming "from the same region".

There is presumptive evidence that Hilton attended the University of Cambridge, some time between about 1360 and 1382. Walter de Hilton, Bachelor of Civil Law, clerk of Lincoln Diocese, was granted the reservation of a canonry and prebend of Abergwili, Carmarthen, in January 1371. In January 1371 Hilton was a bachelor of law attached to the diocesan court of Ely. Some manuscripts describe Hilton as a commensor or inceptor decretorum, i.e. one who had completed the studies and examinations for a mastership of canon law, but had not undertaken the regency that would give him the title.

In the early 1380s, Hilton turned away from the world and became a solitary, as he tells in his earliest extant work, a Latin letter De Imagine Peccati (On the Image of Sin). Not long after (perhaps in 1384), Hilton states in a Latin epistle of spiritual counsel, De Utilitate et Prerogativis Religionis (On the Usefulness and Prerogatives of Religion, also known as Epistola aurea), addressed to his friend Adam Horsley, a former officer of the Exchequer, who was about to enter the Carthusian Order, that he is himself open to the idea of joining a religious community but still uncertain of his vocation. Since Horsley entered the Beauvale Charterhouse in 1386, it seems likely that Hilton also joined a community around that date: 1386 is often suggested as his date of entry into Thurgarton Priory, Nottinghamshire, as an Augustinian Canon Regular.

Between 1386 and 1390, Hilton was probably the author of Epistola de Leccione, Intencione, Oracione, Meditacione et Allis (Letter on Reading, Intention, Prayer and Meditation), of a brief treatise in English Of Angels' Song, which criticizes an aspect of Richard Rolle's spirituality, and of The Epistle on the Mixed Life, which instructs a devout layman about wealth and household responsibility, advising him not to give up his active life to become a contemplative, but to mix the two. Strong echoes between the Mixed Life and the first of the two books of Hilton's major work, The Scale of Perfection suggest they were probably written about the same time, in the late 1380s. Hilton may also have translated The Prickynge of Love (Stimulus Amoris), an expansion of a book originally by the 13th-century Franciscan James of Milan, which by then was passing under the name of Bonaventure), although this remains a matter of dispute.

In his final years from about 1390 to about 1396, Hilton probably wrote his Latin letter Epistola ad Quemdam Seculo Renunciare Volentem (To Someone Wanting to Renounce the World) and a brief piece on scruples entitled Firmissime crede. He also produced an English version of Eight Chapters on Perfection, which translates a now lost Latin work by the Franciscan Lluis de Font (or Luis de Fontibus), an Aragonese Franciscan who had a regency in theology at Cambridge in either 1391–1393 or 1393–1394. Also in that period, Hilton produced the second book of The Scale of Perfection. According to manuscript tradition, Hilton died on 24 March 1396 as an Augustinian Canon Regular at Thurgarton Priory. However, the manuscript concerned was written much later than the history it reports and contains several historical mistakes.