Now this document, the stereotyped press-warrant of the century, here
concisely summarised in its own phraseology, was not at all what it
purported to be. 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. 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.

The seaman, moreover, so far from being the sole quarry of the
warrant-holder, now sought concealment amongst a people almost without
exception equally liable with himself to the capture he endeavoured to
elude. Retained merely as a matter of form, and totally out of keeping
with altered conditions, the warrant was in effect obsolete save as an
instrument authorising one man to deprive another of his liberty in
the king's name. Even the standard of "able bodies and capable" had
deteriorated to such an extent that the officers of the fleet were
kept nearly as busy weeding out and rejecting men as were the officers
of the impress in taking them.

Still, the warrant served. Stripped of its obsolete injunctions, it
read: "Go ye out into the highways and hedges, and water-ways, and
compel them to come in"--enough, surely, for any officer imbued with
zeal for His Majesty's service.