[2] The poet John Milton made Hobson, and the phrase, well known, by satirising him several times in mock epitaphs.

Whatever tradesman will try the experiment, and begin the day after you publish this my discourse to treat his customers all alike, and all reasonably and honestly, I will ensure him the same success.Hobson arranged the delivery of mail between London and Cambridge up and down the Old North Road,[Note 1][7] operating a lucrative[7] livery stable[8] outside the gates of St Catharine's College, Cambridge as an innkeeper.

[1] When his horses were not needed to deliver mail, he rented them to students and academic staff of the University of Cambridge.

So as not to exhaust them, he established a strict rotation system, allowing customers to rent only the next horse in line.

The conduit channelled water from Vicar's Brook, a lesser tributary of the River Cam fed by springs at Nine Wells five miles south of Cambridge.

[14][15] Hobson is commemorated at Nine Wells on a nineteenth-century obelisk and in Cambridge on a seventeenth-century stone fountain at the conduit head.