Walter Hilton

Walter Hilton (c. 1340–45 – 24 March 1396) was an English Augustinian mystic, whose works became influential in the 15th century.

Walter Hilton was born around 1340–45. Writing long after Hilton's death, an early-16th century Carthusian, James Grenehalgh, from Lancashire, referred to the mystic as coming "from the same region".

Presumptive evidence indicates that Hilton received some education at the University of Cambridge, which would have been from about 1360 until about 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, and the Ely Consistory Court in 1375 also refers to a Walter Hilton. Some manuscripts describe Hilton as a commensor or inceptor decretorum, i. e. he may have completed the studies and examinations that would have entitled him to become a master of canon law, but did not undertake the regency that would have given him the title.

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

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

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