Hockeril is now the E. suburb of Bishop’s Stortford, the bridge over the Stort, near the Old Black Lion, connecting it with the town. It has a modern Gothic church. The E. extremity of Hockeril is almost on the border line between Hertfordshire and Essex.
HODDESDON (1½ mile N. from Broxbourne Station, G.E.R.) is an ancient market town, lying on high ground among beautifully diversified surroundings. It is known, at least by name, to all readers of The Complete Angler; but the old Thatched House, to which Izaak Walton often resorted, has long been a thing of the past. The Bull Inn still remains where it stood in the time of Prior, whose allusion to it in his Down Hall is invariably quoted in local handbooks:
“Into an old inn did this equipage roll,
At a town they call Hod’sdon, the sign of the Bull,
Near a nymph with an urn that divides the highway,
And into a puddle throws mother of tea”.
The stone figure to which Prior refers is no longer to be seen. At the S. end of the High Street, on the right when entering the town from Broxbourne, stands Rawdon House, an embattled Jacobean mansion of red brick, built by Sir Marmaduke Rawdon in 1622. It was restored in 1877, and the stucco with which it was formerly coated was removed. A tower, with cupola roof, is at the rear of the house, which is now a convent for Augustinian nuns.
The Church of St. Catherine, close to the site of the old Thatched House, but W. from the opposite side of the High Street, dates from 1732; the tower was added in 1888. It is a large building of red-brick, in mixed styles, with small windows of stained glass in the chancel. It is not interesting.
Hollesmore End (2 miles W. from Redbourn Station, M.R.) is a small hamlet.
Holwell is a village and parish transferred from Bedfordshire to Hertfordshire in 1897. It is about 1½ mile N.E. from Pirton ([q.v.]); the nearest station is Henlow, M.R., 2 miles N. The Church of St. Peter, very much restored, was originally Perp. There is a xii century holy water basin, and a very curious old brass to Robert Wodehouse, a priest (1515), with figures of two wodehowses (wild forest men) and of a chalice and paten.
Hook’s Cross (2 miles E. from Knebworth Station, G.N.R.) is a hamlet on the main road from Hertford to Stevenage. Frogmore Hall stands in a small park ½ mile E.; it is a large modern mansion of red brick and stone facings. The grounds are very picturesque, and are divided by the river Beane.
Hormead, Great (2½ miles E. from Buntingford), has a restored fifteenth century church, perhaps 1400-20, containing a brass to a benefactor, one William Delawood (1694) and a mural monument to Lieut.-Col. Stables, killed at Waterloo. The village is close to the river Quin, which flows between the church and Hare Street on the Cambridge Road.
Hormead, Little (½ mile S. from the above), has a quaint little Norman and E.E. church on the hill crest overlooking Hare Street. Leaving the Cambridge Road at the S. end of that village, and crossing the river Quin, the rounded arch of the Norman doorway on the N. side of the nave catches the eye as we approach the village. The door itself is partly of wrought iron work, seventeenth century; an engraving of it is in Cussans’ History of Hertfordshire. There is excellently preserved work in the Norman nave. It has been surmised that “Hormede” was formerly one vill, that it was divided soon after 1100, and the two churches built on the hill less than ½ mile apart. Ralph Baugiard and Eustace, Earl of Boulogne, together held the manor of “Hormede” at the time of the Great Survey, and the names Hormead Magna and Hormead Parva are of later origin.