Guilielmus van
Messaus was a Flemish composer who spent his entire life in Antwerp. He was
a fairly colorful character, a schoolmaster and sacristan who was dismissed from
his teaching job for bad behavior and also suspended from his choirmaster duties
temporarily for refusing to perform a plainchant mass rather than a polyphonic
one for the burial of a child. As a composer he wrote mostly masses and motets,
plus a sizeable number of Flemish and Latin carols.