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== The shilling ==
Perhaps something about 'taking the shilling' could be put in? With the trick that officers used to put the shilling at the bottom of a beer mug, offer it to seamen in the pub, and when they got to the bottom and discovered, the officer could claim the seamen had taken the 'payment'?([[User:Halbared|Halbared]] 08:35, 9 June 2006 (UTC))
:Taking the King's shilling, I think, belongs to the land services such as the army, artillery, and cavalry — I'm not sure it would be relevant to an article on impressment (impressment was a specific practice in the navy with official legal backing at the time, not just any attempt to trick or force people into military service). We also want to be careful to avoid repeating the 18th or 19th-century equivalent of urban legends, so we'd need some credible sources. [[User:Dpm64|David]] 01:24, 12 June 2006 (UTC)
::Taking the King's shilling is absolutely accurate and was a practice of the naval Impress Service, not just the land forces. If you follow the link at the bottom of the page, it shows a reproduction of an original impressment commission that specifies paying one shilling to each man pressed. The bit about putting the shilling in a beer mug is more questionable, but it does appear in secondary sources (check Stephen Bown, ''Scurvy'', 2005), so it would appear to pass the minimum Wikipedia threshold for inclusion.
::[[User:Piratedan|Pirate Dan]] 19:16, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
:::In the Royal Navy, they called it a "bounty", if I recall correctly, not the King's shilling, and it was given after volunteering and entering a ship's books. What generally happened, at least according to reliable sources like N.A.M. Roger, is that seamen were sometimes offered a choice of volunteering or being pressed rather than just being dragged off — in that case, they'd choose ''volunteering'' to collect the bounty, as a small consolation.
:::The beer-mug trick wouldn't make sense in the Royal Navy, because there was no need to trick them into taking a shilling — the impress service was allowed just drag them off to the receiving ship regardless. Britain had no conscription for other military services like the army or artillery, so people had to at least ''appear'' to volunteer for those — it would make sense to try to trick someone there (whether the beer-mug trick is true or not).
:::Maybe your source is confusing impressment with the [[quota system]], where some ports and counties supplied "volunteers" (often landsmen, criminals, old men, etc.) to get an exemption from the press. Each port or county could find its volunteers any way it wanted, and the volunteers received a fairly large bounty for joining — much larger than the bounty given for volunteering to the impressment service. [[User:Dpm64|David]] 13:01, 30 June 2007 (UTC)
::::The shilling bonus was not just for volunteers; pressed men got it too. The impressment commission is crystal clear about that. The volunteers got a variable bounty over and above the one shilling that everybody got.
::::Nevertheless, I agree that there's no apparent sense in using the beer mug trick on sailors, as you're absolutely right that they could have pressed the man with or without his accepting the shilling. Even with the secondary source support, we'd better leave out the beer mug story for now. [[User:Piratedan|Pirate Dan]] 15:33, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
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