The word was in English by 1664, directly from Latin. John Wilson, an English playwright and lawyer, used it in his comedy The Cheats, in a line giving a gift to a woman.
Medieval Latin had already used the word around 1270, as a shorter version of a two-word phrase. Behind the word lay a Roman legal term, which appears in Latin in the second century, from Greek.
Two parts made up the Greek word, the first meaning 'beside' and the second 'a dowry'. This second part was related to a Greek verb, which traces to a Proto-Indo-European root, *bher-, meaning 'to carry'.
BEAR, the verb, and OFFER share the same root, meaning 'to carry'. BEAR descends from Old English beran, 'to carry, bring', and also 'to give birth'. OFFER descends from Old English ofrian, 'to present to a god, or to sacrifice', from Latin offerre, 'to bring before'.
By 1862 Anthony Trollope used the word to describe everything that goes with justice, from judge to jury. In 1921 a Canadian newspaper reported a magistrate using it to describe the opium-related things an accused man admitted owning. Today it is more commonly used to describe a general collection.
