Hobson's choice is said to come from a Cambridge stable

Thomas Hobson ran a carrying business between Cambridge and London, taking the mail up and down the Old North Road. When his horses were not needed for the mail, he rented them to students and teachers at the university. His stable stood by an inn on land that now belongs to St Catharine's College.

He kept about 40 horses, so a customer walking in seemed to have plenty of choice. The rule was that you took the horse in the stall nearest the door, or none at all. Left to choose, customers would always have taken the fastest horses, and those horses would have been worn out. Hobson's rule sent them out in turn.

Hobson died in 1631. John Milton, a student at Cambridge at the time, wrote several mock epitaphs for him. One has the lines "Here lieth one who did most truly prove / That he could never die when he could move."

The phrase was in print by 1660, when the writer Samuel Fisher already called it a proverb: "Hobson's choice...which is, choose whether you will have this or none."

In 1712 The Spectator told the story and called him "Mr. Tobias Hobson." It praised the system, under which every customer was "alike well served according to his chance, and every horse ridden with the same justice." It also mentioned a fresco of him at an inn on Bishopsgate Street in London, with a bag of a hundred pounds under his arm.

In 1625 Hobson bought Anglesey Priory and turned it into a country house, which as Anglesey Abbey now belongs to the National Trust. He was also one of those behind a channel dug between 1610 and 1614 to bring fresh water into Cambridge from springs south of the town, and he set up a trust to look after it. The trust still exists.

The channel is called Hobson's Conduit. A stone fountain that once stood in the market square, moved in 1856 after a fire, marks its head at the corner of Lensfield Road. From April to September its water still runs in open gutters along both sides of Trumpington Street.