Knight, Lord Chief Justice of England.
Eldest son of John...was of the Inns of Court and was called to the bar; made Sergeant-at-law in 1453, and knighted in 1458 for taking a prominent part with the Lancastrian party. When the right of the crown was argued (1466), he appeared at the bar of the House of Lords as counsel for Henry VI, leading the Attorney and Solicitor General. He was the principal law adviser to Edward IV, and in 1463 was made Justice of the King's Bench, and in 1468 Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench. In the spring of that year he was struck with apoplexy, and expired in a few days after a tenure in office for seventeen years in the midst of civil wars and revolution. He was buried in Bittlesdan Abbey in Oxfordshire, where a large blue marble slab was placed overhis body, having on it the figures, in brass, of himself and his lady. He is represented in his official robes. This slab and the slab that covered his son Thomas were taken from the Abbey after the dissolution of monistaries and placed at the upper end of the Wappenham Church, where they now remain.
Sir Thomas, by his first wife catherine, daughter of Roger Giffard of Twyford in Buckinghamshire, Esquire, became possessed of Gifford's Manor, in the Hamlet of Astwell, and parish of Wappenham in Northamptonshire, afterwards called Billing's Manor, where he took up his residence. The ancient manor house, although much curtailed in size in still standing (1861), and now occupied as a farm-house.
The second wife of Sir Thomas Billing was Mary, daughter and heir of Robert Wesenham of Conington, Huntingdonshire, Esquire, and widow of Thomas Lacy and William Cotton. She died on the 14th of March, 1499, and was buried in the south asile of St. Margaret's Church at Westminster, a great portion of which church was rebuilt by herself and her husband, Sir Thomas Billing. A monument was there erected in her honor.
The children of Sir Thomas Billing, all by his first wife, were: Thomas, his heir, who succeeded to the estate in Astwell, and died on 23d of March, 1508-9, leaving four daughters, coheiresses, by whose marriages the large estates of the Billings passed into other families; John, who settled in Buckinghamshire; Roger, of whom nothing is known; William, who probably settled in Wedon Beck; Nicholas, Katherine, Isabel, Margaret.



Title: Ancestral Roots of Sixty Colonists
Author: Frederick Lewis Weis
Publication: Genealogical Publishing Co., Baltimore, 1964
Media: Book
Page: 58
Title: History of Woodstock, Vermont
Media: Book
Page: 589-592