Vexilla Regis — The Royal Banners Forward Go

The history of this prayer

The Vexilla Regis was born in a procession. Queen Saint Radegund, who had left the Frankish court to live as a nun at Poitiers, asked the Byzantine emperor Justin II for a relic of the True Cross. When the fragment arrived and was carried in solemn procession to her monastery on 19 November 569, the poet Venantius Fortunatus, the queen's friend and later bishop of Poitiers, wrote this hymn for the occasion. That is why it speaks of banners going forth: the Cross is entering the city in triumph.

The line “God hath reigned from the tree” takes up an old reading of Psalm 95 (96):10, “the Lord hath reigned”, which some Christian writers from Saint Justin in the second century onwards quoted with the words “from the tree” added, seeing in it a prophecy of the Cross.

In Passiontide

In the Roman Breviary the hymn is sung at Vespers in Passiontide, from the Saturday before Passion Sunday into Holy Week, and on the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, 14 September. On Good Friday, before the Holy Week reform of 1955, it was sung as the Blessed Sacrament was carried in procession to the altar, recalling the procession at Poitiers. The stanza “O Crux, ave, spes unica” (“Hail, O Cross, our only hope”), which is not by Fortunatus but was added centuries later, is customarily sung kneeling.

Which version this is

The original hymn had eight stanzas. The text given here is that of the Roman Breviary, revised in 1632 by the correctors of Pope Urban VIII, who brought the metre into line with classical Latin: Fortunatus's first stanza, for instance, ended “quo carne carnis conditor suspensus est patibulo” (“on which the Maker of flesh, in the flesh, hung upon the gibbet”). Under Saint Pius X the commission on plainchant restored the ancient form, which the Vatican Gradual (1908) adopted. Both are sung today.

The English is the translation of Walter Kirkham Blount, published in 1670.