Adeste fideles

The earliest surviving copies of Adeste fideles are in the hand of John Francis Wade, an English Catholic living in exile at Douai in French Flanders, who made and sold manuscript liturgical books; the oldest is dated around 1751. Whether Wade composed the tune or copied it has never been settled, and the text has been attributed to him, to John Reading and to a Cistercian source. Frederick Oakeley made the English translation, O Come, All Ye Faithful, in 1841. Four Latin verses are usual in performance; the surviving manuscripts contain more.