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.