1512; but nothing is known of the ships which he commanded in 1490 except that they were neither king's ships nor in the king's service. For merchant ships to be guilty of piracy and to be captured by some of those they offended was an ordinary incident of fifteenth-century navigation. The details of Wood's service as related by Pitscottie and embroidered by Pinkerton are for the most part imaginary; but that some such service was actually rendered appears from the confirmation of Largo, with considerable additions, to Wood, his wife Elizabeth Lundy, and his heirs, on 11 March and 18 May 1491. The grant of 18 May was made not only as a confirmation of former grants, but also in consideration of Wood's services and losses, and of the fact that at great expense he had employed his English prisoners to build defensive works at Largo so as better to resist the pirates who invaded the kingdom. In these grants Wood is styled armiger; in a further grant (18 Feb. 1495) he is miles; we may therefore assume that between these dates he was knighted.
He seems to have been frequently in attendance on the king, and to have combined the public and private functions of overseer of public works and vendor of stores for the public service. In 1497 he superintended the building of Dunbar Castle; he is said later to have superintended the building of the Great Michael, and to have been her principal captain, with Robert Barton as her skipper. The only recorded service of this ship is when she went to France in 1513, and then she was commanded by the Earl of Arran as admiral of Scotland. Robert Barton commanded the Lion in the same fleet. The story—which appears to belong to this time—that Wood was sent out to supersede Arran, but could not find the fleet (Burton, iii. 71), which was actually on the coast of Brittany, is more than doubtful. That Wood was a man of good service, the tried servant and trusted adviser of the king, is proved by the grants already quoted and many incidental notices in the official papers; but the exploits by which he is now chiefly known rest solely on the narrative of Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie [q. v.], whose statements can seldom be accepted without corroboration. Later writers than Pitscottie have added to his story till it has been exaggerated out of all possibility, so that the desire to condemn the whole as fiction has necessarily followed. As already shown, this is unjust. The story has a certain basis of fact. Wood died in the summer or autumn of 1515—between Whitsuntide and Martinmas. By his wife, Elizabeth Lundy of that ilk, he left issue. His eldest son, Andrew, has been sometimes confused with his father, with the result that Sir Andrew has been represented as living to an extreme old age. His second son, John Wood (d. 1570) [q. v.], is separately noticed.
[Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, vol. i. (see Index); Register of the Great Seal of Scotland, 1424–1513 (see Index); J. Hill Burton's Hist. of Scotland (cab. edit.), iii. 35–7, 67, 69–71, where the stories from Pitscottie are quoted at length; Southey's Lives of the British Admirals, ii. 162–3. See also Hume Brown's Hist. of Scotland, i. 299 n., and Spont's War with France, 1512–13 (Navy Records Soc.), Index, s.nn. ‘Barton, Robert,’ and ‘Arran, Earl of;’ James Grant's novel, The Yellow Frigate, is founded on the legendary story.]
WOOD, ANTHONY, or, as he latterly called himself, Anthony à Wood (1632–1695), antiquary and historian, was the fourth son of Thomas Wood (1581–1643) of St. John Baptist's parish, Oxford, by his second wife, Mary Petty (d. 1667), of a family widely dispersed in Oxfordshire. His father, a Londoner by birth, graduated B.C.L. in 1619, but followed no profession, having capital invested in leasehold property in Oxford, and adding to his income by letting lodgings and keeping a tennis-court. Anthony was born on 17 Dec. 1632, in a quaint old house opposite the gate of Merton College, held under long leases from Merton College by his father, and afterwards by the Wood family. He received his school education partly (1641–4) in New College school, partly (June 1644–September 1646) in Lord Williams's school, Thame [see Williams, John, Baron Williams]; but in both places his studies were greatly disturbed by the tumult of the civil war.
Baffling the efforts of his family to engage him in a trade, he matriculated at Merton College in May 1647. The Wood family, both as college tenants and by personal friendship with the warden and fellows, had good interest in that college, and Wood was in a few months made a postmaster. He passed through college without distinction, being a dull pupil, and five years elapsed before he graduated B.A. (July 1652). He submitted to the parliamentary visitors in May 1648, though, in deference to post-Restoration opinion, he represents that submission as forced from him by his mother's tears. In May 1650 he was promoted to a bible clerkship, and proceeded M.A. in December 1655. His family influence might have secured for him, as it had done for his elder brother Edward (d. May 1655), a fellowship in Merton, had it not been for his notoriously
