Long Hob

The newly restored Holgate Windmill was open for viewing today so we went to have a look. Impressive restoration and amazing location: a suburb has been built around it but you can still she the Minster and the White Horse.

I walk back across open land which is either commons or otherwise open to the public - Hob Moor, the Knavesmire, Middlethorpe Ing, Fulford Ing. One of these is Hob Moor, one of the ancient strays of York, apparently given to the commoners of the area in the 14th century by a knight of the Roos family.

The picture shows the 'Hob Stone' which is what remains of a stone effigy of some unidentified Sir ? Roos. It was carved about 1315, apparently, and placed at the Knavesmire entrance to Hob Moor in 1717 with the following inscription:

This image Long Hob's name has bore,
Who was a knight in time of yore,
And gave this common to the poor.

Now, I have read a great deal written in the late 17th and early 18th centuries and I can tell you that, setting aside the terrible doggerel, this is faux antique even then, a deliberate and unsubtle attempt to make something seem 'olde worlde'. I find it interesting that such a modern way of (mis)treating history was already appearing and being used politically (remember, this is just before enclosure really gets going).