 Robert Holkot was from the village of Holcot (or “cot in the rock” as he glossed it) near Northampton, and apparently a commoner: he spoke of how the most capable men seemed to come from humbler backgrounds. He joined the Dominican order, and if he received the usual training, obtained his initial education in arts, logic, Aristotelian philosophy, and theology within the Dominican schools. He studied at Oxford, commenting on Peter Lombard’s Sentences in the years 1331–1333. Once he obtained his doctorate in theology, he served as Dominican regent master there. Subsequently, Richard of Bury, the Bishop of Durham, chose Holkot as one of his clerks to work with him in London. Tradition also places Holkot at Cambridge, where he may have served as a Dominican lecturer or regent master in theology prior to 1343, when he is known to have returned to the Dominican priory of Northampton. He remained at Northampton, teaching and writing, until his death of the plague in 1349, acquired, as the story has it, while ministering to the sick (Slotemaker and Witt 2015, 1–4).