Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 7.djvu/319

 9<s. vn. APRIL 20, 1901.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

311

the parish of St. James, Westminster, for the burial of persons who had died of the plague. The purchase of 1733 consisted of

" two messuages situate in the Parish of Padding- ton in the County of Middlesex, being parcel of the Manor of Tyburn, and called Byard's Watering

Place And also six acres of land lying and being

in the common field of Westbourn adjoining

said messuages, and also a piece containing three acres."

Now this land said to be in the Manor of Tyburn is three-quarters of a mile west of the Edgware Road, nearly a mile and a half west of Tyburn stream (or Stratford Place), and but half a mile east of the Kensington boundary. Is the description of the site a mistake one of the miswordings which have given rise to the proverbial facility of driving a coach and six through an Act of Parlia- ment ? When the driving is achieved I will recognize its skill, but in the meantime there stands the Act with its description of the site, and although one instance may not suffice to warrant a decision, we cannot but think of the possibility of there being estate deeds hidden away in lawyers' offices which might reveal the same description of locality.

The Local Act of 1 763 for the sale of land in Paddington to serve as burial-ground for the parish of St. George, Hanover Square, will not offer equal evidence to those who imagine that the name Tyburn was brought to the locality by the gallows, because the ground in this case is scarcely three hundred yards west of the corner of Edgware Road where the gallows were erected. The Act, however, describes the land as " lying at the west end of the field called Tyburn Field," and there is also "a piece of waste lying between the highway leading from London to Uxbridge." Faulkner, in ' History of Kensington ' (p. 413), recites the proceedings of Parliament in 1652 relative to the sale of Hyde Park, and there is mention of a parcel of enclosed ground commonly called "Tyburn Meadow." As it has "the great road to Acton" on the north, it scarcely seems identical with the above "Tyburn Field"; but again, in 1652, we have the name thus far west.

MR. LOFTIE advances against the very tentatively suggested manorial gallows of the Veres (he does not hold to the "De") that they were never lords of Tyburn, but held the manor under the Abbess of Barking. And so said Lysons a century ago without giving authority for the statement. The abbess had the manor at the time of the Domesday Survey, but did she continue to hold it until the suppression of the house?

If so I shall be glad of the proof, as the several Inquisitions p m. mentioning Tybourne do not indicate the fact ; and in the Calendar of Patent Rolls (A.D. 1281-92, p. 173) I find that in 1285 Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, had the king's " promise " of the reversion of manors which he had granted on the marriage of his daughter Joan to William de Warrene, viz., the manors of Medineham, Tybourne, <fec., "all held in chief."

I have thought also that there might be indication of the proximity of Tyburn to Kensington in the Inquisition p.m. of William Essex, 20 Edward IV., 1480. He had acquired West Town, one of the Ken- sington manors, in 1454 (Loftie, ' Kensington,' p. 64), and by the Inquisition his manors were found to be " Westowne in Kensing- ton, Brompton, Chelsea, Tyburn, and West- burn." These five are contiguous and in sequence, unless we find Tyburn out of place and look for it far away from Kensington, east of the brook known by the same name. The greater part of Essex's estate, if not all, had certainly belonged to the Veres, and in this Inquisition, as in others, there is no connexion indicated between Tyburn and the Abbey of Barking.

But probably I shall be corrected on these points, and I am willing to learn indeed, much desiring that difficulties should be reconciled. It tends towards the western conception of Tyburn Manor that unless it was a fact the ground between Edgware Road and Kensington is in the Domesday record unaccounted for, Paddington and Westbourne, as manors, not then existing. Yet if Tyburn covered that ground there would be the awkward interposition of Lile- stone Manor, leaving an outlying portion of Tyburn eastward ot the brook (i.e., between Stratford Place and Tottenham Court Road). For it is a settled point, I believe, that Lile- stone extended southward to the high road (Oxford Street). Are we sure, however, that it was so at Domesday time? It was not until long afterwards that the Knights Hospitallers got the manor, and as they appear to have extended their domain northward, i.e., to Kilburn, may they not also have stretched it southward ?

The grant of lease by Prior Docwra to Blennerhasset, in 1512, of land which ulti- mately became the Portman estate, appears to have applied to a distinct portion of the Hospitallers' domain. This grant (quoted in Thomas Smith's ' Marylebone,' 1833, without reference, for which I should be grateful) contains several interesting field-names, in-