He was born at Châlons-en-Champagne. In 1650 he succeeded GJ Vossius in the professorship of history at Amsterdam. His works were very numerous; in some of them he showed a remarkable critical faculty, as in his dissertation on Pope Joan (1647), in which he came to the conclusion, now generally accepted, that the story is a myth. Considerable Protestant indignation was excited against him on account of this book. In 1628 he has established beyond doubt in his book "Pseud-Isidorus et Turrianus vapulantes" that the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals were a forgery.
However, they began to develop their own musical idiom, influenced, at one extreme, by the early music revivalists such as David Munrow, and the other extreme, by their childhood memories of the Robin Hood TV series, with its pseudo-mediaeval soundtrack by Elton Hayes.
The band was named after Blondel, the musician in the court of Richard I.
John David Gladwin and Edward Baird were born and brought up in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire: Terence Alan Wincott was born in Hampshire but moved to Scunthorpe at an early age.