Mr. Kemble also tells us that by the time of Eàdgàr it had become quite a settled thing to pay tithe; “the English prelates having laid a good foundation for the custom long before they succeeded in obtaining any legal right from the state.” He also states that “cyricsceat,” (as the church-tax was called,) was “originally a recognitory service due to the lord from the tenants of church-lands. But that in process of time a new character was assumed for it, and it was claimed of all men alike as a due to the clergy.” And then those who refused to pay were visited by the king’s reeve, by the bishop’s, and by the mass-priest of the minster, {119b} and they took “by force a tenth part for the minster whereunto it was due.” A ninth part only was left for the refractory subject. While the other eight parts were divided into two. And of this, says the ordinance, “let the landlord seize half, the bishop half, be it a king’s man or a thane’s.” {120} I think it not at all unlikely that those who cultivated the soil in Paddington received no friendly visits from the tithing man till the time of Edgar. Dunstan, at this time Abbot of the Monastery he had restored at Westminster, looked, without doubt, pretty keenly after the loaves and fishes which were to feed his little flock; and as the enclosure of the Pædings was not too far north to escape his acute glance, he might have been the first who took tithe here. When Bishop of London, which he was at the time of his pretended gift of the little farm, he might, too, have obtained property here, as elsewhere, by the means above indicated. For, if any of the accounts we have of him be true, he was evidently not the man to fail in carrying out any scheme of aggrandisement which he had once planned, even when the law was not, as it was in this case, in his favour. And even so late as the tenth century of the Christian era, some inhabitant of this place might have been found, whose refractory and pagan spirit prevented his seeing all the justice and good policy there might be in giving up quietly the tenth portion of his produce to the monks of Westminster. Those monks, in Dunstan’s time only ten in number, though able to visit Paddington occasionally, were too much engaged at Westminster to pay that attention to this little settlement which was required to teach the inhabitants all their christian duties. If this saint, who so honoured the old gentleman’s nose, did in truth first tithe Paddington, he may, in one sense, be said to have bestowed on his monks a small estate here; for this impost remained from his time to the Conquest as a fixed charge on the land. And those who first received tithe here (being, in all probability, sufficiently impressed with the necessity of appropriating it according to law) may have built a chapel in Paddington, with that portion which was legally assigned for the support of a material structure in which the services of the church might be _performed_.