This Manor of Eia was bounded on the north by the _Via Trinobantina_, a road which crossed England from the coast of Suffolk to that of Hampshire, and we now call that portion by Hyde Park the Uxbridge Road: and on the east ran the _Watling Street_, a road from Chester to Dover (of which the Edgware Road is a portion), which crossed the _Via Trinobantina_, and continued down Park Lane to the Thames--which was the southern boundary of the manor. About the compilation of Domesday Book the Manor of Eia (we know not why) was divided into three manors, named severally Hyde, Ebury (or Eubery), and Neate (or Neyt), and was given by Geoffrey de Manneville to the Monastery of St. Peter in Westminster, where his wife Athelais was interred, and it was in the possession of this monastery till 1536. The Manor of Neate was nearest the river, about Chelsea, and there it was that the abbots of Westminster had a pleasure house. We read[8] how Nicholas Littlington, who was prior of the Monastery, was made Abbot on the elevation of Abbot Simon Langham to the See of Ely in 1362, and how “he improved the estate of the convent at Hyde”--and also how he died, November 29th, 1386, “at the Manor house of Neyte near Westminster, at that time thought a good building; for the Duke of Lancaster,[9] styling himself King of Castile, desired leave of the Abbot to reside there during a sitting of parliament at Westminster.” And here also was born John, the fifth son of Richard, Duke of York, on November 7th, 1448. Here died (May 12th, 1532) John Islip, who was elected Abbot of Westminster October 27th, 1500, and was buried in a chapel in the Abbey, which he built and which is still called by his name. In his abbacy (1502-3) the building of Henry VII.’s Chapel was begun, and in 1532 he negotiated an exchange between the Abbey and the King; the latter had from the Abbey about one hundred acres of land, part of which was made into St. James’s Park, and the former received in exchange the priory of Poughley, in Berks, of which Cardinal Wolsey had procured the dissolution, to help him endow the colleges he designed at Oxford and Ipswich. Islip’s successor was William Boston, and, in 1536, an Act of Parliament was passed (28 Henry VIII., c. 49) and confirmed by a conveyance dated July 1, 1537, granting the King the lands belonging to the Abbey of “Nete, within the towne and paryshes of Westmynster and Seynt Martyn’s in the Felde,” as also the manors of Neyte, Ebery, and Todington, of the advowson of Chelsea rectory, of some lands at Greenwich, and of several meadows and closes near the Horseferry: in return for which the Abbey was to receive the site of the newly dissolved Priory of Hurley, in Berkshire; which, somewhat singularly, formerly belonged to the same Geoffrey de Manneville who gave the Abbey the Manor of Eia.