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Clovelly Entries, Register of Protection from Being Pressed
Extracted by
Brian Randell
During wartime, in fact up until the Napoleonic Wars (1803-15), the Royal Navy "pressed" many unwilling volunteers into service in order to man its ships. (The twentieth century saw a revival of such conscription, on a grand scale, in the form of National Service.) In theory any seamen, aged between 18-55, were liable to be seized. However certain classes of seamen could obain certificates of exemption - these are recorded in a series of volumes now in The National Archives, called Registers of Protection From Being Pressed, in the ADM 7 (Admiralty Miscellanea) Series.
In at least some of these volumes, the details of certificates are given in columnar form, and each seaman's home port is stated, so that it has proved relatively easy to extract all entries relating to Clovelly from such volumes. Typically entries include not just the name of the vessel concerned, but also give its tonnage and no. of seamen (those other than the master remaining un-named), and its trade.
For further details of the Impress Service see The Press Gang, from the Broadside web-site (archived copy), "a collection of pages describing life in Royal Navy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century".