Under all the major indicators of economic change, that is, population, growth, urbanization, production and exchange, institutions, and stock of knowledge, there are reasons to believe that the period between 700 and 500 BC in archaic Greece saw significant developments. This chapter analyzes those developments in more detail by comparing and contrasting the archaeological evidence relating to circa 700 BC and circa 500 BC. It explores how the picture that one can create on the basis of archaeological evidence relates to the picture of the economy offered by one further resource making its dramatic appearance in this period: literary texts. Athenian Solon puts a value upon the individual citizen, whose political capacity is determined by his wealth. That there was a transition from gift to commodity during the period from the eighth to the sixth century has often been suggested. The chapter traces both the economic background to that change and its political origins.

The period from around 1400 saw the swift emergence of Middle English as a broadly based literary vernacular. Prior to the last quarter of the fourteenth century, the literary potential of the language had been largely expressed in local, provincial forms of verse. New forms of vernacular compilation emerged, often with a significant poetic component, such as anthologies or miscellanies. Seemingly random compilations representing the whims of individual taste, or determined by unrecoverable peculiarities in the availability of exemplars, might perhaps be regarded as distinctive products of a manuscript culture. Provincial families anxious about the reading matter of children and household members, Londoners with civic and mercantile as well as literary interests, and coteries experimenting with the cultivation of polite social verse have been convincingly associated with certain surviving collections. The development of secular literature in the vernacular produced both pronounced continuities and equally pronounced disjunctions after the introduction of printing into England.