John Speed (1551 or 1552 – 28 July 1629) was an English cartographer, chronologer and historian of Cheshire origins. The son of a citizen and Merchant Taylor in London, he rose from his family occupation to accept the task of drawing together and revising the histories, topographies and maps of the Kingdoms of Great Britain as an exposition of the union of their monarchies in the person of King James I and VI. He accomplished this with remarkable success, with the support and assistance of the leading antiquarian scholars of his generation. He drew upon and improved the shire maps of Christopher Saxton, John Norden and others, being the first to incorporate the hundred-boundaries into them, and he was the surveyor and originator of many of the town or city plans inset within them. His work helped to define early modern concepts of British national identity. His Biblical genealogies were also formally associated with the first edition of the King James Bible. He is among the most famous of English mapmakers.
Life
Origins and early life
According to his daughter Sarah Blackmore, John Speed was born in the Cheshire village of Farndon in c. 1551/52. Various families of Speed dwelt in that neighbourhood, but John's relation to them is not precisely established. His father John Speed gained the freedom of the Company of Merchant Taylors of London in April 1556, and is supposed to be the same John Speed who married Elizabeth Cheynye at Christchurch, Newgate Street in the City of London in January 1555/56. From this it is inferred that Speed's birth-mother died during his infancy.
By his own account, Speed followed in his father's mercantile business in London, and in 1580 he obtained the freedom of the Merchant Taylors' Company by patrimony. He had married Susanna (born c. 1557/58), daughter of Thomas Draper of London, in 1571 or 1572, and began to raise a family. Most sources state that they had twelve sons and six daughters, of whom the most famous to reach maturity was John Speed, M.D., who studied at Merchant Taylors' School, London and St John's College, Oxford. It appears that the Speed family was fairly well-to-do.
Patronage
Speed came to the attention of learned individuals, among whom was Sir Fulke Greville: Greville, "perceiving how his wide soul was stuffed with too narrow an occupation" (as Thomas Fuller has it), thereafter made him an allowance to enable him to devote his whole attention to research:
In around 1590 Speed was working with the Puritan scholar Hugh Broughton, and developing their work on the genealogies of Jesus Christ. By 1595 he published a map of biblical Canaan, and in 1598 he presented his maps to Queen Elizabeth. As a reward for these efforts, Elizabeth granted Speed the position of a Waiter (a customs officer):
He was by then a scholar with a highly developed pictorial faculty. In 1600 he presented three maps of his own making to the Merchant Taylors, who hung them in their Hall or Parlour and made provision for them to be protected by curtains. This gift was remembered in 1601 when Speed sought a lease from the company on a property in Fenchurch Street, a request which failed owing to a higher claim:
In 1598 he contributed a genealogical and heraldic frontispiece to Thomas Speght's edition of the Works of Geffrey Chaucer, reprinted 1602.
Maturity
"I shall not fear to commend in the first place, that famous Man John Speed", wrote Degory Wheare in 1637. "He having travell'd over all Great Britain, read diligently all our own Historians, and those of our neighbour Nations, together with a diligent search in the Publick Offices, Rolls, Monuments, and Ancient Writings, or Charters, built up a Splendid and Admired Theatre of the British Empire; which, with great Expedition and Labour, he perfected in XIV. years..." In 1611–1612 the first collated edition of Speed's celebrated atlas and history of Great Britain was published, his son perhaps assisting Speed in preparing surveys of English towns. At the same time, with royal consent, his Sacred Genealogies became incorporated into the first editions of the King James Bible.