Early Embossed Revenue Stamps

Just had to snap up these early revenue stamps. They still look great after more than 200 years.

Lovely stuff indeed, well done you.
(Do they have the Crown stamp on the back?)

Cypher Seals

Just purchased these so they are in shipment. There should be cypher seals at the back. I read that the William III seal is rare, not sure what are the other rare seals. The rare colours for the paper are red, green and vermilion. Blue paper is the most common apparently. Will get the other colours if I come across any.

Just won these rarer vermilion embossed revenue stamps in an auction...

Back in 2017 I bought a lot from Rasdale that included 100s of these, at the time I didn't even know what they were. Here's one lot I sold on ebay;








As I recall they were pretty popular.

The Stamp Act of 1694 was for the purposes of allowing the Queen to collect taxes for use vellum, parchment and paper for a period of 10 years initially. It later proved to be such a good way of collecting revenue (£50k a year) that they decided to continue it. These stamps are in my opinion more significant than the penny black in the judicial sense as court documents were not enforceable without these stamps on them. I find these stamps to be rather underrated in the philatelic world when they actually played a very important role in British history. When these stamps crop up in auctions, they are usually snapped up quickly due to their low prices.

I had a lot of fun with them. I like to buy unusual items just to learn about them and these were more interesting than a lot of things I've dealt with.

There's a lot of history in these stamps and they are worthy of any collector's album space. I am looking out for the other coloured ones if I can get my hands on them.

Here's some more I had;

Love the variety you got there.