Born at Saffron Walden, Essex, as a young adult he entered the Carmelite Order in London, and pursued his studies partly there and partly at Oxford, where he took degrees, and spent a number of years in teaching, as may be gathered from the titles of his writings (the actual works being for the greater part lost), which embrace the whole of philosophy, Scripture, canon law, and theology, that is, a complete academical course. He was well read in the classics and the ecclesiastical writers known at the beginning of the fifteenth century, as is proved by numerous quotations in his own writings. Only the dates of his ordinations as acolyte and subdeacon are on record, 1394 and 1395.