John Francis Wade

Copying music for chapels, seminaries and private patrons was John Francis Wade's living. He belonged to the community of English Catholics who kept close links with institutions on the continent, teaching and writing out plainchant and liturgical music in manuscripts known for their calligraphy and decoration. The authorship of Adeste fideles — O Come, All Ye Faithful — has been argued over ever since; early manuscripts of it bear his signature. His birth is dated to 1710 or 1711 and he died in 1786, and his own schooling had been in Flanders, at the Dominican college at Bornem. Accounts of his whereabouts differ: a biographical tradition places him among English Catholic exiles in France after the Jacobite rising of 1745, while Timothy Dickey's account places him in London from about 1737 to 1774.