John Speed

An English cartographer, chronologer and historian, who produced a great atlas with plates engraved by Jodocus Hondius. Speed was probably apprenticed as a rolling-press printer as a young man. His earliest cartographic works were historical. The ‘History of Great Britaine’ (1611) and its companion atlas volume, the ‘Theatre of the Empire of great Britaine’ (1612) were published together and highly successful. The maps became the basis for English folio atlases until the mid-18th Century.