The practice of pressing, also known as peine forte et dure (strong and hard pain), was a torture used for many years in England. It originated around 1272, during the reign of Edward I, when accused persons refused to plead at trial, reasoning that if they refused to plead there could not be a trial, and therefore they could not be convicted. They did this because convicted felons and their families lost all of their possessions. The authorities decided to start forcing pleas out of the accused by heaping weights on their chests. Although some of the prisoners succumbed under the pressure and gave their pleas, many died as a result of it (Walker 47). Baker explains that it was those prisoners who were standing trial for such offences as petty treason that actually received peine forte et dure (34). In the reign of Henry IV, pressing began to be used as an unofficial form of execution (Laurence 228).
Prisoners who remained mute when asked to plead were warned three times of the punishment they would receive and given several hours to consider before they were pressed (Parry 98). The prisoner would receive the Judgement of Penance:
That you go back to the prison whence you came, to a low dungeon into which no light can enter: that you be laid on your back on the bare floor, with a cloth round your loins, but elsewhere naked; that there be set upon your body a weight of iron as great as you can bear and greater; that you have no sustenance save on the first day three morsels of the coarsest bread, on the second day three draughts of stagnant water from the pool nearest to the prison door, on the third day again three morsels of bread as before, and such bread and such water alternately from day to day till you die. (qtd. in Parry 98-9).The procedure of pressing was sometimes varied so that the prisoners would have their arms and legs tied to four corners of the room where they were being pressed. Parry cites an example of a man who withstood the pressure of four hundred pounds for two hours before pleading not guilty, as well as that of another man who withstood the pressure of five hundred pounds for half an hour before agreeing to submit a plea (101, 102).
Pressure was obviously considered to be a normal practice in Elizabeth I's and James I's reign since it was often alluded to by such important authors of the time as Dekker, Nashe, Milton, and Shakespeare (Dobb 91). In Richard II, the Queen says "O, I am pressed to death through want of speaking" (3.4.73), and in Measure for Measure, Lucio tells the Duke that "Marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death, whipping, and hanging" (5.1.515-16). These are just two examples of how Shakespeare refers to pressing to explain the circumstances of standing mute or of being tortured by an unwanted situation.
The practice of pressing, with the purpose of eliciting a plea from prisoners, continued until the eighteenth century, when it was replaced with the more humane practice of tying the thumbs together and twisting the cord (Parry 102). Pressure was officially abolished by George III, and it was later enacted under George IV that any prisoner standing mute would be considered to be pleading "not guilty" (103).
-- Tara Drouillard, 2001