It may be worthy of remark, that the ancient Tybourn church, wherever it was situated, was taken down in the year 1400, by order of the Lord Chancellor, Bishop Braybrook, when the honors and estates of the noble family who built and endowed this church, were in the keeping of a youth barely seventeen years of age; {132} and that the Westminster monks never, either by hook or by crook, obtained possession of this ancient advowson. A rival establishment, however, was built either for them, or by them, on their newly acquired property at Paddington, and, as we have already seen, the spiritual direction of the Paddington district was assigned to them as early as 1222; previous to which time a place of worship had been built here; and for upwards of six hundred years this small house, erected both for public worship and public instruction, was deemed sufficient for rich and poor, saint and sinner, and to it an unbought spot of consecrated ground was annexed, the quiet resting-place of all those who had lived in Paddington. So pretty was the church, and so tranquil seemed this country burial-place, not a century since, that many of those who witnessed the abominations committed in the consecrated grounds of London and Westminster, longed to secure for their corruptible bodies a nook in this village church-yard; and so manifest was this desire, during the whole of the last century that, though the population of Paddington was increasing, the burials here far exceeded the baptisms. In Lysons’ “Environs,” this fact stands exemplified thus— Years. Years. Average Annual Avenge Annual Baptisms. Burials. 1702 to 1711 10.6 38.1 1740 „ 1749 16.6 193.3 1780 „ 1789 16.5 192.3 1790 „ 1794 36.6 244.6 And this addition of motionless mortality to the soil, like the development of its resources by the increase of active life, formed but an additional inducement to its insatiable lords to increase their demands upon the people; for I find _from records still preserved_, {133} that after they had obtained the Act which bound the inhabitants of Paddington to pay a rent-charge for their “pretty church-yard;” and after the infamous Act of 1795, the lord and his lessees were urgent in their demands for a share of those fees, which were obliged to be levied on the relatives of the dead, to secure the performance of those duties which these rectors were already well paid to perform.