The village sign was erected for the Millennium, donated by the Parish Council and Long Clawson Dairy. It was designed by John Summers.
The sign has two sides. The large roundel showing a dairy cow on one side (presumably one that supplies the milk for the locally made stilton cheese), and the other a farrier shoeing a horse. They both bear the legend 'Hose 2000'.
Both sides also have 2 smaller rectangular panels, showing scenes from the village.
"As a village, Hose probably came into existence in the late Saxon period (10th - 11th centuries), but evidence of life in the area can be traced back much further than this.
Less than a mile to the south of the parish boundary are a group of Bronze Age burial mounds (1500 BC). whilst scattered flints etc have been found in several parts of the parish.
From the Iron Age, very little remains, except for a prehistoric trackway, which forms part of the parish boundary to the north-east but once we get to the Roman period (1st - 4th centuries AD), there is extensive evidence of occupation, with two definite and two probable Roman-British farmsteads being known in the parish (one of them underlying parts of the present village).
The Dark Ages are - as usual - dark, and the next reliable evidence we have is in the form of late Saxon pottery, which shows that a village as we think of it today has appeared by the 10th - 11th centuries, with a Saxon "manor house" at one end and a church at the other.
The first real written evidence comes with the Domesday Book, from which we can see that something peculiar has been happening in Hose during the late Saxon period, because when Hose is compared with other villages in NE Leicestershire we find that it had a majority of Saxons, a higher percentage of slaves and the lowest percentage of Vikings living in it, than any other village in the area. It was also the most productive. Why the Saxons appear to have maintained the ascendancy in Hose, when they failed to do so in any of the other villages - and whether the productivity is related to this - is anybody's guess. The real reason will probably never be known.
From the 12th century onwards, evidence survives in ever-increasing quantities. The manor house eventually came into the hands of the Charnels, but was destroyed as a result of an inheritance dispute in 1377, with the Sheriff being ordered to go and inspect the site to ascertain the amount of damage done. The outline of the site can still be traced by the surrounding roads and paths, within which the foundations of one wall and wild damson bushes (the descendants of its medieval orchard) still remains.
Traces of 14th century village planning can be seen in the shape of the long thin gardens behind the houses on Bolton Lane, earthworks belonging to a grange owned by Croxton Abbey remain to the west of the village, and the effect of the Black Death can be seen by looking at the list of vicars displayed in the church - three died in the 5 years between 1348 and 1352.
Since then the village has shrunk and grown in turns, being influenced by most of the events which comprise the march of progress or civilisation: from the enclosure of the fields, to the building of the canals; the rise of non-conformist churches; the coming of the railway; the development of a proper road system."
SOURCE - (
visit link)