Manuscript Penmanship On Covers And Stamps.

revcollector, I wish you would post some examples to illustrate your judgment. My revenue experience can't compare to yours, but of the thousands I've seen, the penmanship on 99% of the manuscript cancels ranges from barely passable to horrible. In any event, I like my stamp and would rate the penmanship as superb.

Perhaps you have not seen enough documents. Back in the 1860's any that were not printed were handwritten, and for companies that had a lot of documents to write they hired professionals to write them, mostly to insure legibility. Some of them are astonishing in the beauty of their calligraphy.
There were hundreds of millions of revenues used during the 1862-1883 period, and a great many cancels were nothing at all to look at. But among those cancels where some real care was taken and calligraphy was used, this is about average. Does that explain it better?

If you're referring to entire hand-created documents, then we're comparing apples to oranges. But speaking just of manuscript cancellations, being average in a relatively tiny population of revenues with superb calligraphy is significantly different that being "only a little above average for penmanship on revenues." So yes, thank you for the clarification.

That thought never even occurred to me but makes perfectly good sense.
I just always assumed that everyone had good penmanship because they had to.

Looking at a couple of hand written documents I have, I now think might be in that category. While I'm certain these aren't the best examples they certainly are legible.

My most recent acquisition which happens to match two of my specialized area of collecting. These are York, PA cancels and fancy manuscript handwriting.

Beautifull penmanship on this 1880's Mendocino cover.

Some interesting information on Judge Charles Phelps Braynard can be found here:

https://blog.mac3impact.com/type/gallery/

His obituary is recorded as follows:

Ah ha! So Judge C P Braynard was the judge who heard the Mexico Land grant cases of Mendocino county. Interesting. Thank you wt1, another loose end tied up. A lot of coastal Mendocino county was deeded by Mexican land grants.

very nice little river and wonderful historical details thanks to wt1.
Looks like your cover might have a large "7" fancy cancel. It's kind of light but that's what it looks like to me.