Anglo-American traditions of opposition to impressment are crucial to understanding the later reaction to the forced recruitment of sailors from American ships and the development of the idea that sailors had rights in the early republic. In England, impressing men into the military reached back at least to the Middle Ages, but it had occurred only sporadically until after 1660, when it became a more regular feature of naval recruitment. Throughout the eighteenth century and into the beginning of the nineteenth century, impressing grew in intensity and in the public consciousness. As the British navy relied on the press with increasing frequency, a debate emerged in England. On the one side was the government and the navy, which tended to view the press as necessary to protect the nation. On the other was a public that at times accepted the press as a reality of life for the lower orders, but that also objected to the practice because of its threat to the lives and livelihood of common people. By the mid eighteenth century there emerged a group of writers who supported this opposition and decried the impress as a violation of the liberty of Englishmen. This tradition of opposition reached across the Atlantic and included Britons in North America and the West Indies. In fact, parliamentary legislation in the early eighteenth century prohibiting impressing in the colonies raised even more legal ambiguities about the right to press in North America than existed within the British Isles. As the American colonies were further integrated into the British Empire in the mid eighteenth century, the practice of the impress expanded, and, so did colonial resistance to press gangs. Violence at sea, as well as riots in port cities, strengthened American determination to oppose forced recruitment into the British navy and enhanced the colonial experience with collective action against unpopular parliamentary measures.