Economics

In October 1834, Parliament burned down because someone was clearing out old receipts. The story of the Exchequer's tally sticks, 700 years of split-wood record keeping.

Some of the earliest writing we have isn't poetry or law. It's receipts: the first thing we wrote down, it seems, was who owed what.

In 1494 a Venetian friar published the earliest known printed treatise on bookkeeping. Five centuries on, double entry still answers the same question: why should anyone believe the record?