Yeah

My husband has an irritating habit of holding his hymn book open at the right page but obviously not referring to the text as he belts out carols.

He is perfectly happy growling, in what he thinks a light baritone, the Latin version of ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’, even the fourth verse, beginning: ‘Ergo qui natus die hodierna.’

I’m not saying he’s wrong to apply his sticky brain cells to the Latin version, for that was the one first written down in 1750 by the scholar John Wade, a reviver of plainchant. If you ask me, Wade was the author of the words. His manuscripts, with his own illuminations, included lyrics of many an ancient hymn, such as the Eastertide ‘Vexilla Regis’. We know the authors of those, or at least their origins, but ‘Adeste Fideles’ is unknown before Wade’s penning of a manuscript kept at Glasgow University entitled, unpromisingly, Modus intonandi gloria patri.