died at Glasshouse Street on 17 Nov. 1812. Billington was an industrious composer and compiler. His most remarkable productions are his settings of poems like Gray's ‘Elegy,’ Pope's ‘Eloisa,’ and parts of Young's ‘Night Thoughts’ to heterogeneous collections of his own and other composers' music. In one of these curious compilations he arranged Handel's Dead March in ‘Saul’ as a four-part glee, while Jomelli's ‘Chaconne’ figures as a song. Besides these works, Billington published several sets of instrumental trios, quartetts, and sonatas; and canzonets and ballads for one and more voices. During the greater part of his life he lived at 24 Charlotte Street, but towards 1825 he removed to Sunbury, Middlesex. He died at Tunis in 1832.
[Brit. Mus. Cat.; Records of Royal Society of Musicians; Gent. Mag. lxxxii. pt. ii. 501, cii. 382.]
BILLINGTON, WILLIAM (1827–1884), dialect writer, was born at the Yew Trees, Samlesbury, near Blackburn and was one of the three sons of a contractor for roadmaking. The father died when the boy was between seven and eight years of age, and in consequence he had little or no schooling, but as soon as possible entered upon factory life as a 'doffer.' In 1839 the family removed to Blackburn, and Billington passed through various stages of employment in the cotton mills, from 'doffer' to weaver and 'taper.' He was also for some time a publican. His intimate knowledge of the was of thought and speech of Lancashire wording people was turned to account in the period of the Lancashire cotton famine, when his homely rhymes were circidated in thousands of broadsides. Of the ballad of 'Th' Shurat Weyvur' 14,000 copies were sold in that time of distress. Another popular rhyme, 'Th' Tay and Rum Ditty,' usually attributed to him, was written by 'Adam Chester,' the pseudonym of Charles Rothwell. The most important of his sketches, in prose and verse, have been collected in two works, 'Sheen and Shade,' which appeared in 1861, and 'Lancashire Poems with other Sketches,' published in 1883, some copies of which have a photographic portrait. High literary merit cannot be claimed for Billington, but he is a faithful painter of the life of the district, and a certain philological value attaches to his representation of the East Lancashire dialect. He was twice married, and died on 1 Jan. 1884.
[Sutton's List of Lancashire Authors; Bibliographical List published by the English Dialect Society; private information.]
BILNEY or BYLNEY, THOMAS (d. 1531), martyr, was a member of a Norfolk family which took its name from the villages of the same designation in that county. Local historians (Blomefield's Norfolk, iii. 199, ix. 461) assert that he was born either at East Bilney or Norwich; but these statements seem to rest on probability rather than definite evidence. The date of his ordination as priest makes it impossible for him to have been born before 1496, and as both his parents were alive at his death, it is improbable that he was born much earlier. When still very young he went to Trinity Hall, Cambridge. His ardent religious temperament drew him from legal studies towards an active clerical life. In the summer of 1619 he was ordained priest by Bishop West, at Ely, on the title of the Priory of St. Bartholomew, in Smithfield (MS. Cole, xxvi. 161, from West's Register; MS. Add. 5827). The absence of any reference to his status in Bishop West's Register proves that he did not take his degree of LL.B. or become a fellow of his college until some subsequent time.
The earlier period of Bilney's manhood seems to have been passed in a series of spiritual struggles analogous to those of Luther. He sought for relief in those mechanical theories of 'good works' which the reigning scholasticism inculcated. But fastings and watchings, penances and masses were powerless to relieve the sense of sin that weighed so heavily on his sensitive temperament. At last the fame of the great scholar's Latinity attracted Bilney to the edition of the New Testament which Erasmus had published in 1516. That Erasmus's Latin, rather than the Greek text, should have allured Bilney, suggests that he, whose early studies had been in the civil and canon laws, had little or no knowledge of the latter language. Like Luther, Bilney found in the teaching of St. Paul what he had so long sought for in vain in the arid tenets of the schoolmen. 'Immediately I felt,' he exclaims, 'a marvellous comfort and quietness, insomuch as my bruised bones leapt for joy.' Henceforward the scriptures were his chief study. A bible which once belonged to Bilney is still preserved in the library of Corpus College, Cambridge. Its frequent annotations and interlineations show how diligent he had been in its study. The doctrines of justification by faith, of the nothingness of human efforts without Christ, of the vanity of a merely external religion of rites and ceremonies, became for Bilney, as for so many others of his generation, the starting points of a new and brighter existence. Other young Cambridge men were groping on the same
