Reference has been made elsewhere to Islip’s legal training. This was doubtless responsible for his appointment in 1510 as a trier of petitions of England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland, an office which he continued to fill in the years that followed. In 1519 Wolsey deputed him along with others to hear the causes of poor men depending in the Star Chamber, while in 1512 and subsequent years his name appears on the Commission of Peace for the County of Middlesex. Among the minor activities of these years may be included Islip’s work in 1524 as a Collector for Middlesex on behalf of the loan for the war with France, and in 1526 as a Commissioner of Sewers from East Greenwich to Gravesend, work in which he was associated among others with Sir Thomas More and Lord Cobham. It is interesting to note in the Navy List for 1513 the Abbot of Westminster as part owner of the ship _Kateryn Fortileza_, doubtless one of that gallant squadron which swept the Channel under Sir Edmund Howard and blockaded the port of Brest. Little record remains of any activity Islip may have displayed in Parliament. As a mitred abbot he was summoned to the assembly which met early in 1515, and there is some evidence to shew that in 1523 he was not a silent member, but his record in this connection is to be sought in the work of Parliament in general rather than in individual effort. Elusive references to Islip in public documents are not infrequent in the second decade of the sixteenth century, but it is not easy to place them in their historical setting. For instance we find that he had evidently made a loan of some magnitude to his fellow Privy Councillor, the Earl of Shrewsbury, but the purpose of the loan cannot be discovered and we note only the difficulty which Shrewsbury had in making repayment and the not unusual mode of behaviour on the part of the defaulting debtor of sending a present of venison in place of an instalment of the debt.