Anthony Wood

Anthony Wood was a seventeenth-century English antiquary and historian best known for documenting the history of the University of Oxford and the lives of writers educated there. A lifelong Oxford resident, he collected manuscripts, inscriptions, genealogies and personal testimony with extraordinary persistence, producing works that remain valuable sources despite his strong opinions and frequent quarrels with contemporaries.

Wood recorded Oxford lives, institutions and controversies with exceptional detail, although his judgements were often personal and partisan. He appears as one of the narrators of An Instance of the Fingerpost, where his habits as a collector of testimony shape the final account.

In Iain Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost, When Robert Grove, a fellow of New College, dies and the servant Sarah Blundy is accused of poisoning him, four men record sharply conflicting accounts of the case: the Venetian physician Marco da Cola, the Royalist son Jack Prestcott, the mathematician and cryptographer John Wallis, and the Oxford antiquary Anthony Wood.