This is an English locational surname, which is well recorded in the surviving church registers of the city of London. Unfortunately these recordings do not tell us where to find Lobley itself, as no such place seems to be recorded in the gazetters and maps of the British Isles for the past three centuries. This would suggest that Lobley or Loblie is another example of the known three thousand or so villages and even small towns which have disappeared since the MiddleAges or that the name of the place has been changed and is no longer recognized, that the spelling of the surname has itself changed. All these are possible! Locational surnames were given to people after they left their original village for whatever reason, to move somewhere else. That somewhere else was often London, the city whose streets were, according to legend, "paved with gold". As to why so many places disappeared has been the subject of several books, but changes in agricultural practices particularly from arable to sheep requiring many fewer workers, creeping urbanisation which swallowed up many villages, the great plagues, war, and the draining of the lowlands, all played their part. This name is believed to translate as Lob's farm, with lop or lob being a short form of a Viking word meaning "fugitive." It is also found in the village of Lobthorpe in Lincolnshire. Examples of the surname recording include Alice Loblie at the church of St Mary Whitechapel, Stepney, on February 8th 1572, and Hugh Lobley at St Johns Hackney, on October 17th, 1614.

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