“In our Colets or Colletts (sometimes the diminutives of Colin) we are reminded of the colet, or acolyte, who waited upon the priest and assisted in carrying the bread and wine, in lighting the candles, and performing all subordinate duties.” - Bardsley's English Surnames. The name is several times to be met with on the Norman Exchequer Rolls of 1180-98, but I do not find it enrolled among the nobles of the Duchy. At nearly the same date, Alexander Culet occurs in the English Rotuli Curiæ Regis, and John de Colet witnesses Geoffrey Fitz Piers, Earl of Essex’s foundation charter of Sutton Hospital, Yorkshire. - Mon. Anglicanum. About 1272, Dyonisia and Walter Colet are found in the Rotuli Hundredorum, as well as John and Laurence Colet, of London. In Buckinghamshire “the Colets are to be found in the list of gentry of 1433, but have lately become extinct in the male line, and are represented by Mr. Stratfold Colet, or Collet, as the name is now spelt, of Hale-Leys, in the parish of Wendover. Sir Henry Colet, Lord Mayor of London, father of Dean Colet, was of this family.” - Lysons.

Dean Colet was the celebrated founder of St. Paul’s School. His name is inseparably connected with the revival of learning in the fifteenth century, when the fall of Constantinople had driven Greek scholars to take refuge in Italy, and a group of the most distinguished of them were congregated at Florence, under the wing of Lorenzo the Magnificent. It was there that the new school of teaching was first established; and that John Colet, solely “with a religious end,” went to learn Greek, “the key by which he could unlock the Gospels and the New Testament.” He came back to Oxford imbued with a deep sense of the early simplicity and purity of the Church, as founded by the Apostles, and divested of “the corruptions of the Schoolmen;” and laboured indefatigably and enthusiastically for the reformation of religion and the revival of letters. He preached and lectured “like one inspired - raised in voice, in eye, in his whole countenance, out of himself;” and carried away his hearers by the strange fervour of his eloquence. “When I listen to my friend Colet,” writes Erasmus, “it seems like listening to Plato himself.” In 1505 he became Dean of St. Paul’s; and on his father’s death in 1510 inherited an ample fortune, which he devoted “to the foundation of a Grammar School besides St. Paul’s. The bent of its founder’s mind was shown by the image of the Child Jesus over the Master’s chair, with the words ‘Hear ye Him’ graven beneath it. ‘Lift up your little white hands for me,’ wrote the Dean to his scholars in words which prove the tenderness that lay beneath the stern outward seeming of the man, - ‘for me which prayeth for you to God.’” - Green's History of the English People. He died in 1519.

"Acolyth, acoIgthus, in our old English called a colet, was an inferior church servant, who next under the sub-deacon waited on the priests and deacons, and performed the meaner offices of lighting the candles, carrying the bread and wine, and paying other servile attendance." Kennet's Parochial Antiq. Bum's Eccles. Law. See Collett below.