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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: was one of the persons assigned in June, 1529, to aid Cardinal Wolsey in hearing causes there. He and Serjeant Wil- loughby were knighted in 1534, being the first serjeants, as is noticed in Spelman's MS. Reports, who ever submitted to receive that honour. In 1535 he was elevated to the chief justiceship of the Common Pleas. The precise date of his patent is not known ; but as the last fine levied before his predecessor, Sir Robert Norwich, was in February, and the first before him in April, it must have been granted between those dates. Within a few weeks he was called upon to act as a commissioner on the trials of Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher, in which, however, he does not appear to have taken any active part. He continued chief justice for ten years, resigning between Trinity Term, 1545, the date of the last fine levied before him, and November 6, when his place was supplied by Sir Edward Montagu.1 His death occurred on December 22. Notwithstanding his early promise, he docs not seem to have been much esteemed as a judge. He differed frequently from his brethren, and was certainly thought little of by Chief Justice Dyer, who on one occasion says in his Reports, " But Baldwin was of a contrary opinion, though neither I, nor any one else, I believe, understood his refutation." He possessed the manor of Aylesbury in Bucks, and in the last year of his life he obtained some valuable grants from the king, of the farms of several manors in that county and in Oxfordshire, which had been either forfeited by the attainder of their former possessors, or seized on the dissolution of the monasteries.2 All his property, for want of male heirs, was divided among his daughters, one of whom, Catherine, was married to Robert Pakington, M.P. for London (assassinated in the streets in ...
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