30 Facts About John Speed

John Speed was an English cartographer, chronologer and historian of Cheshire origins.

John Speed accomplished this with remarkable success, with the support and assistance of the leading antiquarian scholars of his generation.

John Speed 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.

John Speed's work helped to define early modern concepts of British national identity.

John Speed is among the most famous of English mapmakers.

Various families of Speed dwelt in that neighbourhood, but John's relation to them is not precisely established.

John 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", thereafter made him an allowance to enable him to devote his whole attention to research:.

John Speed was by then a scholar with a highly developed pictorial faculty.

In 1615 John Speed requested of the Company the renewal and extension of the lease on a garden and tenement, granted by them in 1594 to George Sotherton, which John Speed had since held and upon which he had built "a fayer house", but which he had afterwards surrendered to them with nine years of his tenure still outstanding.

John Speed then purchased an adjacent garden and plot of taynter to enlarge his own grounds, and in 1618 obtained the Company's permission to annex it and to enclose it with a wall, together with another new lease.

John Speed was buried alongside his wife in London's St Giles-without-Cripplegate church on Fore Street.

The royal patent enabled John Speed to have the profit of it in reward for his various great labours.

John Speed is said to have admitted, for this reason, that "Mr Broughton was a means under God of great Blessings to him, and his Children, for worldly comforts": he reputedly confessed to having burned a great quantity of Broughton's manuscripts.

In 1616 John Speed developed the genealogies into a longer work, A Cloud of Witnesses confirming the Humanity of Christ Ihesus, with lengthy textual explanations, in twelve chapters, for the descents shown in his diagrams or family trees.

Speed acknowledged gratefully that Sir Robert's cabinets were unlocked and his library set open, to supply the "chiefest garnishments" of this work, such as antique altars and trophies, and ancient coins, seals and medals: that the books and collections of John Barkham were similarly brought to his assistance; and that William Smith, Rouge Dragon, had particularly helped in matters of heraldry.

The many coins, seals and other antiquities illustrated in John Speed's text were cut by the Swiss wood-engraver Christoph Schweitzer.

John Speed is best-known as a map-maker, and above all for his atlas, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, which attempted a complete set of individual county maps of England and Wales, as well as maps of Ireland and a general map of Scotland.

John Speed took various existing maps as his models, crediting five to Christopher Saxton, five to John Horden, two to William Smith, one to Philip Symonson and others to John Harrington, William White, Thomas Durham, James Burrell, and Geradus Mercator.

Much of the engraving was done in Amsterdam at the workshop of the Flemish engraver Jodocus Hondius, to whom John Speed's project was recommended by Camden, and with whom John Speed collaborated from 1606 until Hondius's sudden death in 1612.

John Speed is admired for his detailed plans of principal British towns, several of which are the earliest-known depictions of those places and provide valuable topographical insights.

John Speed drew historical maps as well as those depicting present times, showing invasions of England and Ireland, or the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy, a subject previously attempted for William Lambarde's Archaionomia published in 1568.

In describing his intentions John Speed admitted the possibility of errors despite his best endeavours:.

John Speed represented Wales as a separate province from England but not as an independent entity.

John Speed's arms, granted by William Camden, are: "Gules, on a chief or, two swifts volant proper".

John Speed has short hair with a trimmed beard and moustache, and wears a gown and cape over a buttoned tunic surmounted by a ruff.

The descriptions by Newcourt, Strype and Granger of John Speed's monument agree with the text given in Anthony Munday's 1633 edition of Stow's Survey of London, and all clearly refer to the wall monument and inscriptions depicted by Smith and now remaining in restored form.

William Shakespeare had near connections with St Giles, Cripplegate parish, of which John Speed was a parishioner.

John Speed is saying that Persons the Catholic author had infamously falsified the historical character of Oldcastle the Lollard martyr by representing him as the cowardly rebel portrayed in the late Elizabethan stage plays.

John Speed's historiography employs "theatrical metaphors" and makes use of medieval mythical content.

John Speed's maps being used in many circles, Speed's influence was long-lasting and far-reaching.