In 1545 Robert Glossop, of Offerton, was fined for trespassing on Abney Common.[67] In 1465 John Glossop, of Wodsetys, in Norton (Norton Woodseats, near Sheffield), leased to Henry Foliaumbe a messuage in Offerton called Le Storthe for twelve years.[68] It would not be difficult to make out a considerable history of the Glossop family and their relations from the Lichfield wills and the other usual sources of information.
We must not be in too great a hurry to conclude that Offerton means upper farm, as Over Haddon means Upper Haddon. Overton, in Ashover, means upper farm, but Mr. Jeayes has shown that in the thirteenth century Offerton, in Hathersage, occurs once as Hofnertoun, and that a man called Eustace de Hofnerton lived there.[69] Other early forms of the name are Offirtun and Offreton; in Domesday it appears as Offertune, a berewick of Hope. Mr. Searle has told us that Offerd is found in Old English charters and in Domesday as a form of the man’s name Osfrith,[70] and, if we could put aside Hofnertoun as a scribe’s error, this is probably the first element of the word. In the thirteenth century we have Over Offerton and Nether Offerton, otherwise Kauereshegge.[71] Was Nether Offerton ever so called? Possibly the scribe should have written Hauereshegge, a form of Hathersage, as old documents show.
The Offerton Hall estate is the property of H. Cunliffe Shawe, Esq., of Weddington Hall, Nuneaton, to whom it has descended from Robert Newton, Esq., of Norton House, who was born in 1713 and died in 1789. Mr. Newton was a wealthy man and a great purchaser of land, this being one of his many estates. In a survey belonging to Mr. Shawe, made about eighty years ago, the Offerton Hall property is described as containing eighty-five acres, and as including the following fields: The Acre with Kentny Barn, Great Kentny, Kentny Meadow, Kentny Wood, Breedy Acre with the Precipice, Wild Hey, Siss Acres, Cornhill Cap Meadow, and Great White Ley. As the map shows, Kentny Meadow is close to the hall. A place called Kenteney, in Upper Offerton, is mentioned in deeds of the thirteenth century.[72] This name represents an older Centan-īg, meaning Centa’s “island,” and we have the same termination ey (īg or īeg) in Abney, which adjoins Offerton, and in a manuscript survey of 1451 is written Albeney.[73] We can rely upon this form of the name, not only because it was taken from an older survey, but because the surname De Albeney occurs in North Derbyshire in 1250.[74] Now the surname Albeyn is found at Chesterfield in 1339,[75] and is the English form of the Latin Albāgnus. Abney, therefore, means Alban’s “island.” Eyam, which adjoins, is written Eium or Eyum in the thirteenth century, and the termination -um is so very frequent that we cannot doubt that it is a dative plural, and that the word means “islands.” These “islands,” it need hardly be said, were not pieces of land surrounded by water. They remind us of the intermixed townships which are so frequent in some parts of England, as if strangers or conquerors had settled amongst a conquered people. At Eyam, the “islands” seem to have been the lands which were held by military tenure, or “hastler lands,” as they were known in the neighbourhood.
Siss Acres may be six acres, for Chaucer has sis for six. If so, the word is interesting as pointing to French influence in the neighbourhood.
In 1611 it is said that Offerton is a manor of itself, then in the tenure of Henry Cavendish, Esq.[76]
ROODS, SCREENS, AND LOFTS IN DERBYSHIRE CHURCHES
By Aymer Vallance, F.S.A.
Although still comprising a considerable amount of excellent screenwork, the county of Derby has suffered grievous losses in this regard, losses for which, if fanaticism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was primarily responsible, ignorance and indifference in the eighteenth century, and wilful perversity of so-called “restorers” during the “Gothic revival” of the nineteenth, have produced consequences not less disastrous.
At the beginning of the religious revolution in England, inaugurated in the reign of Henry VIII., every church and chapel in the land had its rood-screen, surmounted by a rood-loft. Above them both was the great rood, or cross, with a figure of Our Lord outstretched upon it, flanked almost invariably by statues of St. Mary and St. John. Of these ornaments the rood-loft was the latest to be developed, not becoming general previously to the fifteenth century. It had, however, been preceded in cathedral and monastic churches by the pulpitum, a thick wall with a gallery on the top of it at the west end of the quire. In churches of this class, the rood-screen would be situated parallel to the pulpitum, but further westwards, in the nave.