{19} “A manor, manerium, a manendo, because the usual residence of the owner.” This learned expounder of our laws further explains “that it seems to have been a district of ground held by lords or great personages.” Book ii, p. 90. {20a} Mr. Park says that the Shuttup Hill Estate “affords one among many instances of the freedom with which religious corporations were in the habit of elevating their lands and farms into _manors_.”—_Topography of Hampstead_. p. 194. {20b} Priests, who formerly were permitted to practice in the Law Courts, were, a little before this time, for very good reasons no doubt, prevented from doing so. But they did not quietly submit to this loss of their influence in the worldly concerns of the people; and they adopted all kinds of contrivances to keep up their former power. Amongst others, equally honorable, we find they adopted the wig to hide that which would have otherwise betrayed their holy calling.—Vide _Sir H. Spelman’s Conjectures on the Introduction of the Coif_; _Glossar_, p. 335, _and Blackstone_, vol. I. p. 24. {21a} The statute passed in the eighteenth year of Edward’s reign, which put an end to the further increase of manors, must have been fresh in this Abbot’s memory; and it was this law, perhaps, which induced him to place Paddington and Westbourn under the maternal wing of Westminster. {21b} Tenement is a word of still greater extent than land, for though in its vulgar acceptation it only applied to houses and other buildings, yet in its original, proper, and legal sense it signifies every thing that may be _holden_, provided it be of a permanent nature; whether it be of a substantial and sensible, or of an unsubstantial ideal kind.”—_Blackstone_, vol. ii, p. 17. {21c} Placita de Quo Warranto, Edward first Rot. 39, p. 479 of the work published by the Record Commission. {21d} At the present time there is preserved a Fine Roll in the Record Office, Carlton Ride, containing an account of the Temporalities of the Convent of Westminster, from the eighth to the tenth years of Edward the second, taken after the death of Richard de Kedyngton (or de Sudbury), the Abbot who succeeded Walter of Wenlock, and although this document was examined with great care by two gentlemen accustomed to examine documents of this kind no notice or account of Paddington could be found in it amongst the numerous possessions therein described. {22} Was the first of these inquisitions directed in consequence of the omission of any mention of Paddington in the return of the Abbey possessions just alluded to; or was it suggested by the legal advisers of the Convent to secure a title to their lands in these places? {24} This Walter Franceys is in all probability the Water Fraunceis of the preceding inquisition, whose descendants we find to be possessed of land in Paddington, after the reformation, like the descendants of John Colyn, mentioned in the next inquisition.