In July 1370, at about seventeen years of age, Thomas Arundel, the second son of Thomas FitzAlan, the Earl of Arundel, began his ecclesiastical career with the award of the archdeaconry of Taunton, a royal presentation granted during the vacancy of the see of Bath and Wells following the translation of John Barnet to the see of Ely. Two years later, in March 1372, he is recorded as also holding canonries and prebends at Chichester, Hereford and Shaftesbury Abbey, the free chapel in Exeter Castle, and a canonry with expectation of a prebend at York; in May of that year he was called upon to settle a dispute concerning the election of proctors in Oxford. By the summer of 1373 Arundel was in residence at Oriel College. ‘The most obvious mark which the young Thomas Arundel left upon Oxford’, as Margaret Aston notes, ‘was an architectural one. He enjoyed the distinction, unusual among undergraduates in any period, of endowing [his college] with a chapel.’ In August 1373 his university career ended with his election, by papal dispensation, as Bishop of Ely (although it was more than two years before he took up residency in the diocese, and he was not enthroned until 20 April 1376). Arundel thus eclipsed Henry Wakefield, the royal candidate for the see, who was instead elected to the see of Worcester two years later.

Walter Hilton, who was probably about ten years older than Arundel, is first recorded at Ely as ‘Walterum de Hilton, clericum Lincolniensis diocesis, Bacallarium in legibus apud vos’ in a papal mandate dated 28 January 1371 (when he would have been approximately twenty-eight years old), petitioning for the reservation of the canonry and prebend of Abergwili, in Carmarthen; the Ely Consistory Court Register records him again in 1375, again as a bachelor in laws. If, like many clerics of his age, ‘Walter de Hilton’ took his last name from the place of his birth, he may well have come from the Huntingdonshire village of Hilton (the only place of that name in the diocese of Lincoln), approximately 15 miles northwest of Cambridge, to which university he would have proceeded.