Great Britain - Embossed revenue stamps on indenture

Just to avoid any confusion between the earlier colored vellum embossed revenues that are attached to a document by a tin escutcheon band and the later ones directly embossed on a document, here is a scan from eBay of the later directly embossed revenues that were cut off of documents or attached like postage stamps with the vermilion embossing applied. 




I think vikingeck is correct about the first adhesive postage stamp. A government would not go to the trouble of stamping something unless it benefitted. A British requirement for a contract to be enforceable in court was that its revenue had been paid. Those could be high fees and it could be decades before a will, deed or some indenture needed enforcement by a court. On the other hand, postage was much cheaper and covered a much shorter period of time (from receipt to delivery of a mailed item), with nothing to later enforce in court.  British Postage Stamp Acts show collecting for the receipt, transit and/or delivery of mail as a form of taxation. It could be said that cancellations on stampless covers are merely an inexpensive way to "stamp" a document without the added expenses of embossing them.  The above inked vermilion direct embossed stamps show the government's efforts to reduce the costs involved with attaching embossed vellum revenues.  Also with attached embossed vellum revenues, the cypher seals (labels) can fall off the backs of documents (especially if the document has gotten wet).  

Rowland Hill's adhesive stamps resolved the cost savings transition to the more easy revenue collection method of having the sender pay the postage in advance rather than the prior methods where either the sender or recipient could pay.  Many stampless covers exist with complicated rate calculations which were sent unpaid and thus required the separate calculation and collection of the proper postage from each recipient.  While cypher labels (seals) had sufficient permanency to survive the relatively short term process of receipt and delivery of a letter, they were not used for postage. Some reasons for not using cypher labels as postage stamps may include the number of cypher labels already in use on the backs of documents.  These were not canceled and some might attempt to reused them to avoid payment of the postage fee.  Further, the attractiveness of Rowland Hill's design encouraged usage, further promoting the sender to pay.

Some unrelated information about attached embossed colored vellum revenues, take a look at the embossed metal portions of the escutcheon bands in the scans of my Five Shillings embossed red vellum revenue in a previous post above and at the embossed blue vellum revenues posted in this thread in 2014.  You can see how the impressions of the embossing die continue across both the colored vellum attachment and the top of the escutcheon band that holds it to the document.  I point this out because some people mistakenly identify the metal composing the escutcheon band as silver because it is shiny and appears to have a "silver" color.  Actually it is a metal with a "silver-ish" appearance.  Have you heard people describe the color of a shiny metal as "tinnish"?  Tin was the standard metal used as it was much cheaper and is more malleable than silver.