John Speed

John Speed

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. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of John Speed has received more than 205,480 page views. His biography is available in 20 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 19 in 2019). John Speed is the 72nd most popular geographer (down from 65th in 2019), the 5,038th most popular biography from United Kingdom (down from 4,696th in 2019) and the 6th most popular British Geographer.