The early Royal Mail charged people a rate of twopence per sheet of paper, for every 80 miles carried, paid by the addressee rather than the sender. All letters were sent via London, along six "post roads" - to Dover, Yarmouth, Plymouth, Bristol, Holyhead, and Edinburgh.

The first penny post

There was no local delivery for letters until 1680, when a wealthy businessman called William Dockwra set up a private post in London which carried letters for a penny, prepaid by the sender. Dockwra opened seven sorting offices, and almost 500 receiving houses, where Londoners could post their letters.

The private penny post was so popular that the Royal Mail saw it as a threat to its monopoly. In November 1682, the Duke of York, the King's brother, took Dockwra to court and closed his business down. A month later, he reopened the service as part of the Royal Mail. Dockwra was compensated with a pension.

In the 18th century, penny posts were set up in other cities and large towns throughout the country. In 1801, to help finance the war with France, the price was increased to twopence, usually now paid by the letter's recipient.

Mail coaches

The Royal Mail employed postboys to carry the letters, riding on horses which were often decrepit. In 1762, the merchants of Dundee complained of postboys riding "lame horses that scarcely go at a trot". Postboys were also vulnerable to highway robbery, and it was not safe to send valuables through the mail.

In 1784, John Palmer, a Bath theatre manager, proposed the introduction of light fast coaches, carrying guards armed with blunderbusses, to carry the mails. Palmer organised a trial run, in which a mail coach left Bristol at 4pm on August 7, 1784, and arrived in London the following morning before 8am. In under 16 hours, Palmer’s coach had travelled 116 miles - a journey which would take a postboy up to 50 hours.

Palmer's London to Bath service was quickly followed by others throughout the country. The coaches carried a limited number  of passengers, and ran to a strict schedule - if passengers were not ready in time, they were left behind. This punctuality was a security measure against highway robbery. If a coach failed to arrive when expected, an alarm could be raised. It was much safer to travel by mail coach than on the slow-moving stage coaches of the time.

Mail coaches were a great success until the 1830s, when they rapidly declined with the arrival of the railways. In Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers of 1837, a character looks at a decaying mail coach and thinks "of the busy, bustling people who had rattled about, years before in the old coaches... of the numbers of people to whom one of these crazy mouldering vehicles had borne, night after night, for many years, and through all weathers, the anxiously expected intelligence, the eagerly-looked for remittance, the promised assurance of health and safety, the sudden announcement of sickness and death.”

Rowland Hill

In the early 19th century, most letters were paid for on delivery. This caused a great deal of work for the postmen, who had to wait to collect money whenever they delivered a letter. The high cost of postage meant that a postman's visit was often unwelcome, and many people refused to accept delivery.

In 1837, an inventor called Rowland Hill published a pamphlet calling for postal reform. He suggested a standard rate of a penny a letter, no matter the distance travelled, to be prepaid by the sender. Hill calculated that the cut in the price of posting a letter would be more than compensated for by the increased number of letters posted, and by the savings in administrative costs.

The idea of cheaper postage was resisted by the Post Office, yet it proved hugely popular with the public. By 1839, more than 2,000 petitions bearing 262,809 signatures had been handed to Parliament supporting Hill's scheme. One came from the Lord Mayor of London and 12,500 City merchants and businessmen, people who had much to gain from reduced rates. In 1839, Parliament passed an Act to bring in the penny postage, which was introduced on January 10, 1840.

The first stamp

Rowland Hill also suggested the use of a gummed label to indicate prepayment, which he described in his pamphlet as "a bit of paper just large enough to bear the stamp, and covered at the back with a glutinous wash, which the bringer might, by applying a little moisture, attach to the back of the letter".

On May 6, 1840, the Penny Black was issued - the world's first prepaid adhesive postal stamp. This was so successful that by 1860, 85 countries had followed Britain’s lead and issued their own postage stamps. In the same year, Hill was given a knighthood, and Prime Minister Gladstone said of his reform that it had "run like wildfire throughout the civilised world".