If, then, the districts now called Westbourn and Paddington, were
included in the manor of Tybourn in the Conqueror’s survey, it is very
evident that a rearrangement, both of these districts and the
neighbouring manors, must have taken place when the Westminster monks
established their claim to Paddington. And it is not improbable that the
lords of Chelsea, Kensington, and Tybourn, insisted upon maintaining, for
themselves and their tenants, commonable rights over the Westbourn
district.
How the monks of Westminster, in the course of time, became both
spiritual and temporal masters of the Westbourn district, can be readily
conceived by those who know anything of the power engendered by the
concentration of all knowledge into a few bodies, especially if those
bodies have a perpetual existence.
As I have before said, the monks found that their forged charters would
not sufficiently serve them legally to inherit Paddington. They were
obliged therefore to purchase the interest in the soil from at least one
of the families whose ancestors had made it valuable. This appears from
a document which I have translated below, and which is to be found in
Maddox’s Formulare Anglicanum, page 217, and which as appears by a note,
at the foot of it, this learned and indefatigable antiquary discovered in
the archives of the Dean and Chapter of Westminster. The document is as
follows:—
“A final Concord of Land between the Abbot of Westminster and Richard
and William de Padinton.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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