These civic authorities were often made the butt of a good deal of banter. What particular mayor was thus honoured it is, of course, impossible to determine; his individuality has been absorbed in his mayoral dignity. Small local jealousies between one village or town and a neighbouring one are often responsible for this sort of thing, the provincial mind loving to score over the people in the next parish or the next county. Where no real option is given to a person the proverb "Hobson's choice" is suggested. One Tobias Hobson was an innkeeper and carrier at Cambridge, and a man of considerable local influence. He was said to be the first man in England that made a business of letting out horses for hire. However this may be, his custom, a custom that supplies the material for the adage, was that when anyone wanted a horse he was led into the stables, where some forty animals were ready for use, but the inexorable rule was that there should be no picking and choosing, a necessity being laid upon the customer that he took the horse which stood nearest the stable door. He had Hobson's choice and no other. This procedure placed all on an equal level and ensured a rough justice for the horses themselves, as the last horse entering from a journey was put at the far end and was only again liable for service when all the others had first done their turn. "The case is altered, quoth Plowden," was a very popular adage with our ancestors, and especially in Shropshire. Edmund Plowden was an eminent lawyer in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, born at Plowden, a little village in Shropshire. The following circumstance is said to have given birth to the adage:--A neighbour asked him what remedy he had in law against a person whose hogs had broken into his field, and he was assured that the law would amply protect his rights. Whereupon the farmer replied that they were his (Plowden's) hogs. "Nay then, neighbour," quoth Plowden, "the case is altered." We learn hereby that it is hardly well for a man to be both defendant and judge, but it is due to Plowden's memory to add that in choosing the name of some lawyer to tack on to the proverb they merely took the name of one exceptionally well known. He was by a distinguished contemporary writer described as "A man second to none in his profession for honour and integrity." Plowden or no Plowden, the adage points to the duty of doing as we would be done by, and is a fair satire on the general readiness of lawyers to argue on either side at short notice, and to take very special care of "number one."