Wood, or A WOOD, ANTHONY, antiquary, was born at Oxford, 17th December (St Lazarus' Day) 1632. In 1647 he was entered at Merton College as a gentleman-commoner, and became a postmaster; in 1652 he took his bachelor's, in 1655 his master's degree. Being of independent means, he took to no profession, but practised the violin assiduously, and devoted himself to heraldry and antiquarian studies. Lighting on Dugdale's Antiquities of Warwickshire, he recognised the work of his life, and thereafter laboured with a more constant assiduity. The fruit of these labours was his History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford, his copy of which the delegates of the university press bought for £100, caused it to be translated into Latin, and published as Historia et Antiquitates Universitatis Oxoniensis (2 vols. folio, 1674). Wood was very ill satisfied with the translators' work, and made a new copy of his English MS., which was at length published by John Gutch, as I., The History and Antiquities of the Colleges and Halls in the University of Oxford, with an appendix containing Fasti Oxonienses and Index (2 vols. 4to, 1786-90); II., The History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford (2 vols. in 3, 1792-96). He continued to labour on his great work, Athenæ Oxonienses: an exact history of all the writers and bishops who have had their education in the university of Oxford from 1500 to 1690, together with the Fasti or Annals for the said time (2 vols. folio, 1691-92). In 1693 he was fined in the vice-chancellor's court and banished the university for some libellous remarks therein on the Earl of Clarendon, but was permitted to return after a recantation. He died 28th November 1695.
Other works were The Ancient and Present State of the City of Oxford (4to, 1773, which forms a pendant to the earlier of his two great works), and the ill-natured Modius Salius, a Collection of Pieces of Humour (1751). Wood himself prepared the materials for a third volume of his Athenæ, but did not see it printed. This was included in the second edition printed by Tonson (2 vols. folio, 1721). The third edition, with additions, is that by Philip Bliss (4 vols. 4to, 1813-20); a projected fourth by the same erudite scholar, to be issued by the short-lived Oxford Ecclesiastical History Society, saw only the first volume, containing the Autobiography (1848). This last was edited in 1892 for the Oxford Historical Society by Mr Andrew Clarke, who admirably edited the Life and Times of Wood, in 5 vols. (1891, &c.).