CCollecting POSTAL HISTORY

What is Postal History

Prior to the fifteenth century most letters were royal or government communications carried by state messengers. The Post Office that we know today, in Great Britain, and Europe had its early beginnings around this time. An ability to write letters was confined to those who were educated and able to read and write, thus most of the early letters that survive today come from the archives of merchants, the clergy, the legal professions and the aristocracy.a very good postal service existed throughout Europe and charges for letters were based on the weight and distance travelled. 
     By today's standards the postal charges were very high and it was the recipient who paid. The first postmarks were introduced during this period and developed rapidly in the eighteenth century. These handstamps showed where the letters originated and thus enabled the post office to calculate the charges. This system remained in Britain until the postal reforms of 1839/40. These reforms were steered through Parliament by Rowland Hill and introduced two fundamental changes.

1. A uniform charge of one penny was charged for any distance in Great Britain for a letter weighing up to ½ oz.

2. Letters could be pre-paid by the sender by means of an adhesive postage stamp which could be bought at the Post Office and stuck on a letter. These ideas were taken up by all the other Post Offices in the world and the international postal system flourished. The cost of posting a letter in Great Britain was not raised above 1d. until the second World War.  

Over the past three hundred years a vast number of letters, documents, postcards and other items connected with the writing and transport of letters, have survived for those who like to collect them. Stamp collections were being made twenty years after the introduction of the penny black in 1840, and by the 1930s most areas of stamp collecting had been studied and catalogued. By the mid twentieth century collectors began to look for other aspects to study than just the adhesive postage stamps. They turned their attention to the postal markings and began to collect and research the handstamps and manuscript postal markings which had appeared on letters prior to the introduction of postage stamps in 1840.   The term POSTAL HISTORY was used to describe this new collecting concept which primarily concerns the study of the postage rates and routes of the mail. There is a vast quantity of material from the eighteenth century, right up to the present day, and now the term POSTAL HISTORY embraces letters from all periods.