prest-man

Updated: May 4, 2025

A fruitful source of the widespread belief that our navy in the old days was chiefly manned by recourse to compulsion, is a confusion between two words of independent origin and different meaning, which, in ages when exact spelling was not thought indispensable, came to be written and pronounced alike. During our later great maritime wars, the official term applied to anyone recruited by impressment was 'prest-man. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and part of the eighteenth century, this term meant the exact opposite. It meant a man who had voluntarily engaged to serve, and who had received a sum in advance called 'prest-money. 'A prest-man, we are told by that high authority, Professor Sir J. K. Laughton, 'was really a man who received the prest of 12d., as a soldier when enlisted. In the 'Encyclopædia Metropolitana' , we find: 'Impressing, or, more correctly, impresting, i.e. paying earnest-money to seamen by the King's Commission to the Admiralty, is a right of very ancient date, and established by prescription, though not by statute. Many statutes, however, imply its existence one as far back as 2 Richard II, cap. 4. An old dictionary of James I's time , called 'The Guide into the Tongues, by the Industrie, Studie, Labour, and at the Charges of John Minshew, gives the following definition: 'Imprest-money. G. [Gallic or French], Imprest-

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