[2] 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.
[2] 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.
[2] 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.
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.
[3] 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.
The most famous was the Scale of Perfection, which survives in some 62 manuscripts, including 14 of a Latin translation (the Liber de nobilitate anime) made about 1400 by Hilton's contemporary at Cambridge and Ely, the Carmelite friar Thomas Fishlake (or Fyslake).