Hearne, THOMAS, an eminent English antiquary, was born in 1678 in the parish of White Waltham, Berkshire, and had his education at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he graduated B.A. in 1699. Two years later he was appointed to a post in the Bodleian Library, of which in 1712 he became second keeper. This office he was obliged to resign in 1716 from his inability to take the oaths to the government, but he continued to live at Oxford occupied entirely with his studies. He died 10th June 1735. Hearne compiled and edited no less than forty-one works, all stamped by painful and laborious learning, although poor in style and somewhat rambling in method. They are usually marred by the intrusion of irrelevant matter—even his Jacobitism crept into his prefaces; yet they remain solid contributions to bibliography, and their author deserved better than to be gibbeted and their Dunciad as a dull and dusty pedant.
His most important books were Reliquiae Bodleianae (1703), Leland's Itinerary (9 vols. 1710-12), Leland's Collectanea (6 vols. 1715), A Collection of Curious Discourses upon English Antiquities (1720); and the editions of Camden's Annals (3 vols. 1717), Allred of Beverley (1716), William of Newburgh (1719), Fordun's Scotichronicon (1722), Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle (1724), and that of Peter Langtoft (1725). The Bibliotheca Hearniana was published in 1848; Reliquiae Hearniana, by Philip Bliss, in 1857. The third volume of Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne appeared in 1889, edited by C. E. Doble for the Oxford Historical Society. See Impartial Memorials of his life by several hands (1736), and the Lives of Leland, Hearne, and Wood (Oxford, 1772).