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Updated: May 16, 2025
Hence, as the change from covert to overt violence grew in strength, "pressing," in the mouths of the people at large, came to be synonymous with that most obnoxious, oppressive and fear-inspiring system of recruiting which, in the course of time, took the place of its milder and more humane antecedent, "presting."
Even in Pepys' time men were pressed "without money," and in none of the accounts of expenses incurred in pressing during the century which followed, excepting only a very few of the earlier ones, can any such item as the king's shilling or prest-money be discovered. Its abolition was a logical sequence of the change from presting to pressing.
It was in fact a warrant out of time, an official anachronism, a red-tape survival of that bygone period when pressing still meant "presting" and force went no further than a threat. For men were now no longer "prested." They were pressed, and that, too, in the most drastic sense of the term. The king's shilling no longer changed hands.
He was merely subjected to a process called "presting." To "prest" a man meant to enlist him by means of what was technically known as "prest" money "prest" being the English equivalent of the obsolete French prest, now pret, meaning "ready."
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