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. [72] Jeayes, _Derbyshire Charters_. [73] _Feodarium_, in the possession of the Duke of Norfolk. [74] _Derbyshire Archæological Journal_. [75] Jeayes, _op. cit._ 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] [76] _Derbyshire Archæological Journal_, vol. xxiii., 89. 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.