The earliest mention of him is from the archives of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, in 1405, where he was probably a choirboy (some uncertainty exists with regard to the name).
In 1410 he held a position at the church of St Donatian in Bruges, and around the same time he may have been a singer in the chapel of Antipope John XXIII.
His service to the Burgundian court began sometime between then and 1423, when he was listed as a valet de chambre for Philip the Good, and in 1426 he was given charge of instructing and caring for two choirboys.
One of his more enigmatic songs is a three-voice rondeau, "Las, j'ay perdu mon espincel", in which the upper voices, the superius and the tenor, are fully written out, but the contratenor is left blank.
Since the manuscript was carefully prepared, it is probable that the missing part was deliberate, and was a pun on the song text "j'ay perdu mon" (I lost my ...), in which case the singer, likely trained to improvise as well as sing from score, would have had to fill in by himself on the spot.