Our first trace of William Colchester's name on the books of the House is in connexion with his ordination as priest. I cannot tell what Bishop admitted him to the ministry, nor where it took place, but it can be ascertained that he said Mass for the first time during 1361-2 (the conventual year was reckoned for administrative purposes, as it is still, from Michaelmas to Michaelmas), and we are able to discover this, not because it was felt to be an event worth chronicling for its own sake, but because in that year three of the officers note that they severally expended 1s. 7-1/2_d._ in bread and wine as "exennia"--_i.e._ a complimentary gift[9]--made to him in honour of the event. We may suppose that he was then twenty-three years of age; he may have entered the Convent in or about 1356; and we may take 1338 as the probable year of his birth. If, as we have assumed, he entered the Convent some years before his ordination, then he did so during the reign of Simon Langham, the most eminent of all our Abbots, but it is not possible to say whether he received priest's orders before or after the election of Nicholas Litlington to the Abbacy in April, 1362. The Monastery was still suffering in numbers from the ravages of the Great Pestilence in 1349, and consisted in 1356-7 of only thirty-five monks and two novices. Colchester was the last of five new members of whom we hear first in 1361-2. Five years later, in 1366-7, he was chosen by the Convent as one of two of their number whom they thought specially apt to learning, and whom it was therefore their duty to send up to Oxford to join the other Benedictine students at Gloucester Hall, an institution established by the Order in its General Chapter held at Abingdon in 1290.[10] Our custom was that the Convent Treasurer paid £10 yearly to each Westminster student for his maintenance,[11] besides the cost of his journeys to and fro; so that it is possible to compile from the Treasurers' rolls a fairly complete list of our Oxford scholars from 1356, when I came upon the first signs of a definite system, until the Dissolution. The plan tended to the great advantage of the monasteries; it meant that the likely young men were taken at an impressionable time in their lives out of the narrow rut of cloistral life, and were associated with the world of scholarship and of affairs; and it will be found that a large proportion of those who were sent to Oxford rose quickly to positions of trust in the Convent. William Colchester remained at Oxford, save for periodical visits to the Abbey, from 1366 to 1370. It cannot be said that the Latin prose of which he was capable does credit to his University, and even monkish Latinity was seldom worse than that in which his few surviving letters are couched. But it is fair to assume that he learnt how to deal with men, and we can now go on to see that the Convent which had supported him at Oxford was satisfied with the product of its expenditure. III