Wade, John Francis

Author & Composer

b ?England 1710 or 1711, d Douai, France 1786. An English Roman Catholic Latin teacher and music copyist, whose family or friends may have joined the small community of RCs who settled for security in N France after the ‘glorious revolution’ of the Protestant William’s accession to the English throne in 1688. He then taught at the Dominican Coll at Bornem, Belgium, where he also learned the copying of plainchant. The widely-quoted evidence from an obituary in the 1787 Catholic Directory indicates that he was a layman aged 75, ‘with whose beautiful manuscript books our chapels, as well as private families, abound, in writing which and in teaching the Latin and church song he chiefly spent his time’. No.367.