There is yet another “probable supposition,” viz. that a speculating builder existed among the Pædings, even in those days, who, for the sake of what he could get for himself, built a chapel here; and the clever Dunstan, or some other bishop, having caught him in thus defrauding God, and God’s poor, made him give a hide of his land to endow the place he had built for his own profit: and who knows, if this were so, but that this churl (ceorl) was aping his betters in some other mark, by aspiring to be greater than he really was; for by a law of Athelstan’s a freeman “who had the possession and property of full five hides of land, and had a church, a kitchen, a bell-house, and a hall, was henceforth entitled to the rank of a Thane.” {121} We have already seen that a chapel was built and endowed in Paddington before the ecclesiastical decree of 1222 assigned this district, with those of Westbourn and Knightsbridge, to St. Margaret’s, Westminster. And one may well suppose, if no Tybourn rector interfered, that a parson was appointed to the cure, and a district assigned to him, whenever this building was erected; and to say that one of the monks who lived in the Convent at Westminster, under the laws and regulations of St. Benedict, was the person first appointed to this cure, does not, surely, invalidate that supposition. Paddington, therefore, may have existed as a rectory and a separate parish, before the beginning of the thirteenth century—before the decree of Stephen Langton, and his brother-priests, converted it into an appendage to a vicarage. But this benefice having been thus appropriated to the use of their own corporation by the company of Benedictin monks, the rectory, if there had been one, became a sinecure; and the poor souls in Paddington were transferred to the tender care of the vicar of St. Margaret’s.