A tradition attached to Hedgerley church explains a fragment of dark red velvet, now framed, as a piece of King Charles IIs cloak. The story says that he gave it to the old church when he was visiting and saw that there was no altar cloth. Removing his cloak, he placed it on the bare table. The period is right: Arthur Mee, in his King’s England: Buckinghamshire (1940), says that museum experts had pronounced it to be 17th century work.
Although most writers seem agreed that the king in question was Charles II, in her Buckinghamshire (1950), Alison Uttley makes it his father, Charles I. Ellen Etlinger, writing in Folklore (1967), likewise reports being told by an informant that the cloak was Charles I’s. Perhaps there was some difference of opinion. A church might have treasured a relic of Charles I less for historical reasons than because he was popularly regarded as a saint having the gift of healing.
Ivinghoe
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Ivinghoe provided Sir Walter Scott with the title of his novel Ivanhoe (1820), as well as the name of its hero. This, he says in his introduction to the 1830 edition:
…was suggested by an old rhyme…recording three names of manors forfeited by the ancestor of the celebrated Hampden, for striking the Black Prince a blow with his racket, when they quarreled at tennis; –
Tring, Wing, and Ivanhoe,
For striking of a blow,
Hampden did forego,
And glad he could escape so.
Scott recalled the rhyme from memory, and is always said to have either forgotten it or deliberately altered it, for the Revd W. J. Burgess in Records of Buckinghamshire (1858) gives it as:
Tring, Wing, and Ivinghoe,
Hampden did forego,
For striking of a blow,
Right glad to escape so.
What is curious is that Scott hit on the form ‘Ivahoe’, for which there is documentary evidence from the 17th century, though this was not published in Scott’s time.
According to Murray’s Handbook for…Bucks (1860), the Black Prince was on a visit to Edward III at Great Hampden when the blow was struck (neither Burgess or the Handbook mentions tennis). The ‘celebrated Hampden’ referred to by Scott is the Parliamentarian John Hampden (1594-1643). The tradition is not historical, as the Hampdens were never in possession of the manors named in the rhyme. It has been suggested that the lines are a fragment of a Cavalier song from the 17th century.