  Stability and error analysis of a hybridized discontinuous Galerkin finite
element method for Stokes equations is presented. The method is locally
conservative, and for particular choices of spaces the velocity field is
point-wise solenoidal. It is shown that the method is inf-sup stable for both
equal-order and locally Taylor--Hood type spaces, and \emph{a priori} error
estimates are developed. The considered method can be constructed to have the
same global algebraic structure as a conforming Galerkin method, unlike
standard discontinuous Galerkin methods that have greater number of degrees of
freedom than conforming Galerkin methods on a given mesh. We assert that this
method is amongst the simplest and most flexible finite element approaches for
Stokes flow that provide local mass conservation. With this contribution the
mathematical basis is established, and this supports the performance of the
method that has been observed experimentally in other works.
