John Speed
John Speed 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.
Family 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, 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", 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 :
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.
Career
"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.In May 1612 Prince Henry asked the Merchant Taylors for his lease on the Company's house in Fenchurch Street to be renewed for Sir Arthur Ingram, as reward for Ingram's good service as Master of the Customs House - which was granted, "to the prejudice" of their brother John Speed. In the 1611 conclusion of his History Speed wrote of "my disease growne dangerous, and life held in suspence." His friend Alexander Gill contributed one of the commendatory verses of the work to Speed, "being very sicke", and wrote that his "...cruell symptomes, and these thirteene yeers assay / For thy deare country, doth thy health & strength decay." But it was as a very renowned person that in 1614 Speed negotiated for the Merchant Taylors the renewal of their lease of the gardens and "tayntor" grounds in the prebendary lands at Moorfields, London which the Company held from the Chapter of St. Paul's.
In 1615 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 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. A new term of 31 years as from Christmas 1614 was approved. 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. As the lease of the premises was later renewed to his heirs, it appears that this house and grounds remained John Speed's residence until his death.
During the same period Speed greatly enlarged his work on the sacred chronologies and genealogies, as A Clowde of Witnesses : and after re-issue in various forms, his History and Theatre were newly presented as a Second, revised Edition, in 1623. In his last years, Speed was working on further revisions and adaptations of his atlas in other formats, and on the materials for his world atlas, which took shape as his Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World in 1627. He continued to maintain his annals, though by April 1626 he had become blind and suffered from the stone.
Death
John Speed died in July 1629 at the age of 77 or 78. He was buried alongside his wife in London's St Giles-without-Cripplegate church on Fore Street. According to Fuller, his funeral sermon was delivered by Josias Shute. A monument to John Speed was soon afterwards erected on the south side of the chancel of the church.Works
Biblical genealogies
The Puritan clergyman scholar Hugh Broughton developed his study of Old Testament chronology and concordance in his work A Concent of Scripture in editions of 1588/89 and 1590, with illustrations said to be engraved by Jodocus Hondius. John Speed, "by acquaintance with Mr. Broughton, grown very studious in the scriptures", "and by his directions grown very Skilfull in them". Owing to the censure of puritan doctrines, Broughton recruited John Speed to see the work through the press, and from this collaboration arose the abstract of sacred genealogies first issued in Speed's name in 1592. In around 1595 the two men brought out an index to that work. To that period belongs Speed's first Map of Canaan in four sheets.In October 1610 Speed was granted a royal patent by King James to publish his genealogical work. In 1611, as The Genealogies recorded in the Sacred Scriptures according to euery family and tribe with the line of Our Sauior Jesus Christ obserued from Adam to the Blessed Virgin Mary, it was incorporated into the first edition of the King James Bible. For many years, this work was bound into all copies of the Authorised Version, and it was reprinted for that purpose many times during the 17th century. It contained some now-famous illustrations, including an image of Adam and Eve taking fruit from the forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden, and a tree of the nations of the world arising out of Noah's Ark. The royal patent enabled Speed to have the profit of it in reward for his various great labours. 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 also reputedly confessed to having burned a great quantity of Broughton's manuscripts.
This work was not merely an ornamental adjunct to the Bible, but had the serious intellectual purpose of expounding a resolution of the differing descents of Jesus Christ from King David as they are recited in the Gospels of St Matthew and St Luke. His continuation and finishing of the Map of Canaan originated by a Puritan scholar, the Norwich minister and chronologer John More, appeared with the date 1611 in the King James Version but the version of this map, which includes portraits of More and Speed, was engraved after the Great Fire of London, in which the original plates were destroyed.
In 1616 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. The first issue was printed by John Beale for Daniel Speed:. Beale printed a second edition in 1620, with a dedication to George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury 1611-1633, and a third appeared in 1628 printed by Felix Kyngston for Edward Blackmore, Speed's son-in-law. Speed's distinctive style of genealogical diagram, with the names contained in circular bubbles linked in chains, later appeared in the royal genealogies in the 1623 edition of the History.
''History'' and ''Theatre''
John Speed's fame today rests, in popular estimation, upon his work as map-maker, but this should not be held separate from his important contributions as a historian, chronologer, and scriptural genealogist. Many of his publications reached their definitive form in 1611. The succession of King James VI of Scotland to the crown of England and Wales, and to that of Ireland, upon the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, brought the Tudor dynasty to a close and inaugurated the House of Stuart monarchy of Great Britain. Speed's historical researches under the patronage of Fulke Greville were stimulated or assisted by William Camden, Sir Robert Cotton, Sir Henry Spelman, John Barkham, William Smith and others, who during the 1580s together formed the Elizabethan College of Antiquaries, predecessor of the London Society of Antiquaries. Their interests were rooted in early-medieval English antiquities. But Speed's work came together, Cum Privilegio, as an instrument of the unification of British kingship in the person of King James, much as the "Authorized Version" of the English Bible to which Speed contributed his sacred genealogies. This English Bible was promulgated in the same year of 1611.The chronicler John Stow, Speed's elder contemporary, from 1562 sought to disentangle the confused order of the English Chronicles, finding much fault in "the ignorant handling of ancient affairs" by Richard Grafton: Stow's Summarie of Englyshe Chronicles of 1566/67, several times republished, his Chronicles of England from Brute unto this present yeare of Christ, 1580, and his The Annales of England, which itself lists a very wide range of sources, were the immediate predecessors to Speed's History, from the historical aspect, as Camden's Britannia in the 1607 edition was his chorographical precedent. Stow announced a forthcoming history of Britain, A Historie of this Iland, in 1592, but it never reached publication. Editions of Florence of Worcester, the Flores Historiarum, and of William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon and others in Sir Henry Savile's Rerum Anglicarum Scriptores post Bedam came into print in the same period. The standard available edition of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica was in volume III of the Hervagius 1563 Opera Bedae Venerabilis.
Speed naturally drew extensively on the work of his predecessors, including Christopher Saxton and John Norden as cartographers, William Camden as chorographer, and upon Stow and other late chroniclers, in so vast an undertaking, while at the same time revising, improving, verifying and subjecting to scholarly scrutiny all that he could, and where possible obtaining new expert contributions. Some letters survive from Speed to Sir Robert Cotton, written in the years before publication, asking for assistance in gathering necessary materials. 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.
From the first page of the Histories a fresh approach is afoot. Speed dispenses with the full list of pseudo-historic rulers stemming from Brutus the supposed founder of Britain, drawn from Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain and repeated by Stow, and instead touches upon the Trojan theory in his discussion of the Name of Britain. Coming into the Saxon narrative, marginal references identify the sources of information from Gildas, Bede, Widukind of Corvey and many others, presenting an erudite voice and a discursive historical method, while preserving the structure and chronology relating to the seven kingdoms, and illustrating coins and other materials in true antiquarian fashion. James Spedding, noting the limitations in Speed's account of Henry VII, allowed that his Historie "was enriched with some valuable records and digested with a more discriminating judgement than had been brought to the task before."