Thomas Billing

Sir Thomas Billing (died 1481) was an English judge and Chief Justice of the King’s Bench.

Billing is said by Fuller to have been a native of Northamptonshire, where two villages near Northampton bear his name, and to have afterwards lived in state at Astwell in that county. Lord Campbell says he was an attorney's clerk; but this seems doubtful. He was, at any rate, a member of Gray's Inn. Writing to one Ledam, Billing says : 'I would ye should do well, because ye are a fellow of Gray's Inn, where I was fellow ' (Paston Letters, i. 43, 53), and, according to a Gray's Inn manuscript, he was a reader there. His social position was sufficient to enable him to be on terms of intimacv with the families of Paston and of Baron Grey de Ruthyn. He was Burgess (Member of Parliament) for Northamptonshire, 1445–6; Burgess (Member of Parliament) for London, 1449, and Recorder of London, 1450-4. Along with seven others he received the coif as serjeant-at-law 2 January 1453-4, and in the Hilary term of that year is first mentioned as arguing at the bar. Thenceforward his name is frequent in the reports.

Lord-chancellor Waynflete appointed him king's Serjeant 21 April 1458, and Lord Campbell, citing an otherwise unknown pamphlet of Billing in favour of the Lancastrian cause, says that with the attorney-general and solicitor-general he argued the cause of King Henry VI at the bar of the House of Lords. The entry in the Parliamentary Rolls, however, indicates that the judges and king's Serjeants excused themselves from giving an opinion in the matter. About the same time Billing appears to have been knighted, and on the accession of Edward IV his patent of king's Serjeant was renewed, and in the first parliament of this reign he was named, along with Serjeants Lyttelton and Laken, a referee in a cause between the Bishop of Winchester and some of his tenants. He is said by Lord Campbell to have exerted himself actively against King Henry, Queen Margaret, and the Lancastrians, and to have helped to frame the act of attainder of Sir John Fortescue, chief justice of the king's bench, for being engaged in the Battle of Towton, and to have advised the grant of a pardon, on condition that the opinions of the treatise ‘De Laudibus’ should be retracted.

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