[1] 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.
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.
For when Henry VI for a few months regained the throne new patents were at once issued, 9 October 1470; and when Edward IV overthrew him, 17 June 1471, he, along with almost all the other judges, was confirmed in his seat.
In 1477 Billing tried Burdet of Arrow, Warwickshire, a dependent of the Duke of Clarence, for treason, committed in 1474, in saying of a stag, 'I wish that the buck, horns and all, were in the king's belly,' for which he was executed.
He married (2nd) Mary Folville, widow successively of William Cotton, Receiver-general of the Duchy of Lancaster, Treasurer of the Queen's Household (killed at the 2nd Battle of St. Albans in 1461), and Thomas Lacy, of Grantchester, Cambridgeshire (died 1479), and daughter and co-heiress of John Folville, Esq., of Sileby, Rotherby, Queniborough, etc., Leicestershire, by Joan, daughter of Robert Wesenham (died 1399), of Conington, Huntingdonshire.
In 1483, his widow and executrix, Mary, sued William Stokker, Knt., Mayor of the Staple of Calais, in the Exchequer of Pleas regarding a debt.
Mary died 14 March 1499/1500, and was buried on the south side of the altar of the church of St. Margaret, Westminster, Middlesex by her 1st husband.