Bear journeys in early modern England

Abstract

This article offers unprecedented insight into the domestic movements of early modern commercial entertainment producers based on fresh archival and archaeological details about bears and bearwards, centring on a surviving two-month journey record. We plot roadways taken and the lengths and times via GIS mapping, offering a fresh spatial humanities methodology to explore commercial life on the road and its consequences. Together, these sources and our interdisciplinary methodologies (uniting archival research and cultural history with spatial humanities, GIS mapping, and zooarchaeology) illuminate what it meant more broadly to travel on foot in early modern England.