User:SiGarb/Hobby horse (toy)



A hobbyhorse (also hobby horse or hobby-horse) is a child's toy horse, particularly popular during the days before cars, when horses were a common form of transport.

Children, and sometimes adults, pretend to ride a wooden hobbyhorse made of a straight stick with a small horse's head (of wood or stuffed fabric), and perhaps reins, attached to one end. The bottom end of the stick may have a small wheel or wheels attached. This toy was also sometimes known as a cock horse (as in the nursery rhyme Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross).

Ritual animal disguise
A hobbyhorse is not always a child's toy, however; folklorists use the term to refer to the much larger hobbyhorses that feature in some traditional seasonal customs (such as Mummers plays and the Morris dance) in Great Britain, and similar customs around the world. Constructed in several different ways, they can be alarming creatures and may bear only a passing resemblance to a real horse.

Pastime or obsession
From the toy hobbyhorse came the expression "to ride one's hobby-horse", meaning "to follow a favourite pastime", and in turn, the modern sense of the term hobby. For example, in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne, the characters' hobby-horses, or particular obsessions, are discussed in detail; notably Uncle Toby's obsession with the military leads him and Trim – who gets caught up in Toby's enthusiasm – to begin acting out military actions.

French also uses the term enfourcher son dada ("to mount one's hobbyhorse") in the sense of a person's favourite topic of conversation. The artistic movement, Dada, may have been named after this French child's word for hobbyhorse or "gee-gee".

Bicycle
The term is also connected to the draisine, a forerunner of the bicycle, invented by Baron Karl von Drais. In 1818, a London coach-maker named Denis Johnson began producing an improved version, which was popularly known as the "hobby-horse".

Origin of term
The word hobby is glossed by the OED as "a small or middle-sized horse; an ambling or pacing horse; a pony." The word is attested in English from the 14th century, as Middle English hobyn. Old French had hobin or haubby, whence Modern French aubin and Italian ubino. But the Old French term is apparently adopted from English rather than vice versa. OED connects it to "the by-name Hobin, Hobby, a variant of Robin'" (compare the abbreviation Hob for Robert). This appears to have been a name customarily given to a cart-horse, as attested by White Kennett in his Parochial Antiquities (1695), who stated that "Our ploughmen to some one of their cart-horses generally give the name of Hobin, the very word which Phil. Comines uses, Hist. VI. vii."

(Dobbin, another familiar form of the name Robin, has also become a generic name for a cart-horse.)

Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language, 1755, glosses "A strong, active horse, of a middle size, said to have been originally from Ireland; an ambling nag." See Irish Hobby.

Hoblers or Hovellers were men who kept a light nag that they may give instant information of threatened invasion. (Old French, hober, to move up and down; our hobby, q.v.) In mediæval times their duties were to reconnoitre, to carry intelligence, to harass stragglers, to act as spies, to intercept convoys, and to pursue fugitives. Henry Spelman (d. 1641) derived the word from "hobby".


 * "Hobblers were another description of cavalry more lightly armed, and taken from the class of men rated at 15 pounds and upwards." - John Lingard: The History of England, (1819), vol. iv. chap. ii. p. 116.

The Border horses, called hobblers or hobbies, were small and active, and trained to cross the most difficult and boggy country, "and to get over where our footmen could scarce dare to follow." - George MacDonald Fraser, The Steel Bonnets, The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers.