John Weever

He may be the son of the John Weever who in 1590 was one of thirteen followers of local landowner Thomas Langton put on trial for murder after a riot which took place at Lea Hall, Lancashire.

In late 1599 Weever published Epigrammes in the Oldest Cut, and Newest Fashion, containing epigrams on Shakespeare, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser, William Warner and Christopher Middleton, all of which are valuable to the literary historian.

It concludes with references to contemporary satirists Joseph Hall and John Marston, and also to the Bishops' Ban of 1599, which ordered the calling in and destruction of satirical works by Thomas Nashe and others.

It has been convincingly argued that Weever was the author of this pamphlet, and that as a result he was attacked in his turn and lampooned onstage as the character Asinius Bubo in Thomas Dekker's Satiromastix, as Simplicius Faber in Marston's What You Will and as Shift in Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humour.

In the fourth stanza of this long poem, in which Sir John is his own panegyrist, occurs a reminiscence of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar which serves to fix the date of the play.

The work included a lengthy introductory global overview of his subject, the "Discourse of Funerall Monuments"; and this was followed by a survey of over a thousand inscriptions in the four south-eastern dioceses of England: Canterbury, Rochester, London and Norwich.

However, Weever viewed the inscriptions primarily as literary survivals, and (unlike some of his contemporaries) took little interest in the genealogical evidence they provided, or in the heraldic elements of many monuments: Graham Parry comments, "[i]t is fair to say that he ignored half the value of a memorial.

The Society of Antiquaries holds two notebooks in Weever's own hand (MSS 127 and 128) which contain a partial early draft of Ancient Funerall Monuments, as well as other material not included in the published volume.

He was commemorated by a marble tablet framed with a black border, and inscribed with a lengthy encomium in verse (afterwards published in the 1633 edition of John Stow's Survey of London).

[5] The engraved frontispiece to Ancient Funerall Monuments includes a portrait of Weever, giving his age as 55; and also the following self-penned doggerel summary of his life: Lanchashire gave him breath, And Cambridge education.