Hugh the Drover (or Love in the Stocks) is an opera in two acts by Ralph Vaughan Williams to an original English libretto by Harold Child. According to Michael Kennedy, the composer took first inspiration for the opera from this question to Bruce Richmond, editor of The Times Literary Supplement, around 1909–1910:

"I want to set a prize fight to music. Can you find someone to make a libretto for me?"

Vaughan Williams worked on the opera for a number of years, before and after World War I. The work did not receive its first performance until 4 July 1924 at the Royal College of Music, London, in performances described as "private dress rehearsals". The "professional premiere" was at His Majesty's Theatre on 14 July 1924. The opera's first performance in the United States took place on 21 February 1928 under the auspices of the Washington National Opera, a semi-professional company not related to its present namesake. Tudor Davies created the role of Hugh in both these productions.

The opera was performed by the professional Canadian Opera Company in Toronto in November 1929, at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto, with a live radio broadcast from the Royal York Hotel on 13 November 1929. In the broadcast, hockey broadcaster Foster Hewitt provided narrative for the fight sequence. These Toronto performances were conducted by Sir Ernest MacMillan, music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra from 1931 to 1955, and featured American tenor Allan Jones in the title role of Hugh. Jones would soon become a Hollywood star. Vaughan Williams continued to revise the libretto and the opera over the remainder of his life. The final version was performed in 1956 and published in 1959.

The opera has set numbers with recitative. It has been described a modern example of a ballad opera. Contemporary comment noted the use of humour and the role of the chorus in the work, in the context of developing English opera.