The Venerable Bede

J. M. Neale attributes the hymn for the Holy Innocents 'Hymnum canentes Martyrum' to the Venerable Bede, and remarks that it compares unfavourably with the Salvete flores Martyrum of Prudentius and that, strangely, no part of it was introduced into any English Breviary. Neale gives no dates for him.

Neale points out that the first and last line of every verse are identical, a device he says Bede seems to have borrowed from the Elegy of Sedulius. This file gives that single version from Mediaeval Hymns and Sequences (1867).