Note 197 — Chapter VII · Plantagenet Gothic Architecture[174]
Reading edition
The Vexilla regis prodeunt hymn is sung on Good Friday when the Blessed Sacrament is carried from the Repository to the main altar, and as a vesper hymn from the Saturday before Passion Sunday to Maundy Thursday. It has also been incorporated in the Roman Breviary for feasts of the Holy Cross. There have been a host of translations. In his Medieval Hymns and Sequences, London, 1813, Dr. J. M. Neale thus rendered the first quatrain:
“The royal banners forward go. The cross shines forth with mystic glow, Where He in flesh, our flesh Who made, Our sentence bore, our ransom paid.”