ABSTRACT
John speed, born the son of a tailor in Cheshire, became an historian and mapmaker, best known for his county maps of England. His first collection of maps was published under the title The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine in 1611: this was reprinted in 1614, with a Latin version in 1616, and again in 1623. Speed's 1611 map of Canaan was republished in 1651, perhaps in response to the reverend Doctor Thomas Fuller's publication in 1650 of A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine and the Confines Thereof in London. Fuller, a former student of Queens' College, and then of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and during the Civil War chaplain to the royalist general Sir Ralph Hopton, was an Anglican preacher, writer and historian. Who in 1649 was given the curacy of Waltham Abbey in Essex and who in spite of his known political sympathies kept his place and his head in difficult times.
