Wife selling in England was a way of ending an unsatisfactory marriage that probably began at the end of the 17th century, when divorce was a practical impossibility for all but the very wealthiest. Although less than 400 cases of wife sales have been recorded, historians note that there were roughly as many wife sales as there were divorces by private acts of Parliament in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The practice, though never legally recognized, followed a ritualized public form, often conducted in a marketplace or inn, with the wife led by a halter and "sold" to a new partner, thereby effecting a de facto, if not de jure, separation. Wife selling provides the backdrop for Thomas Hardy's 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, in which the central character sells his wife at the beginning of the story, an act that haunts him for the rest of his life, and ultimately destroys him.
Although the custom had no basis in law and frequently resulted in prosecution, particularly from the mid-19th century onwards, the attitude of the authorities was equivocal. At least one early 19th-century magistrate is on record as stating that he did not believe he had the right to prevent wife sales, and there were cases of local Poor Law Commissioners forcing husbands to sell their wives, rather than having to maintain the family in workhouses.
Wife selling persisted in England in some form until the early 20th century; according to the jurist and historian James Bryce, writing in 1901, wife sales were still occasionally taking place during his time. In one of the last reported instances of a wife sale in England, a woman giving evidence in a Leeds police court in 1913 claimed that she had been sold to one of her husband's workmates for £1.
Legal background Wife selling in its "ritual form" appears to be an "invented custom" that originated at about the end of the 17th century, although there is an account from 1302 of someone who "granted his wife by deed to another man". The practice was common enough in the 17th century for the English philosopher John Locke to write (apparently as a joke) in a letter to French scientist that "Among other things I have ordered you a beautiful girl to be your wife ... If you do not like her after you have experimented with her for a while you can sell her and I think at a better price than a man received for his wife last week in London where he sold her for four sous a pound; I think yours will bring 5 or 6s per pound because she is beautiful, young, and very tender and will fetch a good price in her condition." With the rise in popularity of newspapers, reports of the practice become more frequent in the second half of the 18th century. In the words of 20th-century writer Courtney Kenny, the ritual was "a custom rooted sufficiently deeply to show that it was of no recent origin". Writing in 1901 on the subject of wife selling, James Bryce stated that there was "no trace at all in our [English] law of any such right", but he also observed that "everybody has heard of the odd habit of selling a wife, which still occasionally recurs among the humbler classes in England".
Marriage Until the passing of the Marriage Act 1753, a formal ceremony of marriage before a clergyman was not a legal requirement in England, and marriages were unregistered. All that was required was for both parties to agree to the union, so long as each had reached the legal age of consent, which was 12 for girls and 14 for boys. Women were completely subordinated to their husbands after marriage, the husband and wife becoming one legal entity, a legal status known as coverture. As the eminent English judge Sir William Blackstone wrote in 1753:
Married women could not own property in their own right, and were indeed themselves the property of their husbands. But Blackstone went on to observe that "even the disabilities the wife lies under are, for the most part, intended for her protection and benefit. So great a favourite is the female sex of the laws of England".
Separation
Five distinct methods of breaking up a marriage existed in the early modern period of English history. One was to sue in the ecclesiastical courts for separation from bed and board (a mensa et thoro), on the grounds of adultery or life-threatening cruelty, but it did not allow a remarriage. From the 1550s, until the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 became law, divorce in England was only possible, if at all, by the complex and costly procedure of a private act of Parliament. Although the divorce courts set up in the wake of the 1857 act made the procedure considerably cheaper, divorce remained prohibitively expensive for the poorer members of society. An alternative was to obtain a "private separation", an agreement negotiated between both spouses, embodied in a deed of separation drawn up by a conveyancer. Desertion or elopement was also possible, whereby the wife was forced out of the family home, or the husband simply set up a new home with his mistress. Finally, the less popular notion of wife selling was an alternative but illegitimate method of ending a marriage. The Laws Respecting Women, As They Regard Their Natural Rights (1777) observed that, for the poor, wife selling was viewed as a "method of dissolving marriage", when "a husband and wife find themselves heartily tired of each other, and agree to part, if the man has a mind to authenticate the intended separation by making it a matter of public notoriety".
Although some 19th-century wives objected, records of 18th-century women resisting their sales are non-existent. With no financial resources, and no skills on which to trade, for many women a sale was the only way out of an unhappy marriage. Indeed, the wife is sometimes reported as having insisted on the sale. A wife sold in Wenlock Market for 2s 6d in 1830 was quite determined that the transaction should go ahead, despite her husband's last-minute misgivings:
For the husband, the sale released him from his marital duties, including any financial responsibility for his wife. For the purchaser, who was often the wife's lover, the transaction freed him from the threat of a legal action for criminal conversation, a claim by the husband for restitution of damage to his property, in this case his wife.
Sale
It is unclear when the ritualised custom of selling a wife by public auction began, but it seems likely to have been some time towards the end of the 17th century. In November 1692 "John, the son of Nathan Whitehouse, of Tipton, sold his wife to Mr. Bracegirdle", although the manner of the sale is unrecorded. In 1696, Thomas Heath Maultster was fined for "cohabiteing in an unlawful manner with the wife of George ffuller of Chinner ... haueing bought her of her husband at 2d.q. the pound", and ordered by the peculiar court at Thame to perform public penance, but between 1690 and 1750 only eight other cases were recorded in England. In an Oxford case of 1789 wife selling is described as "the vulgar form of Divorce lately adopted", suggesting that even if it was by then established in some regions of the country, it was only slowly spreading to others. It persisted in some form until the early 20th century, although by then in "an advanced state of decomposition".
In most reports the sale was announced in advance, perhaps by advertisement in a local newspaper. It usually took the form of an auction, often at a local market, to which the wife would be led by a halter (usually of rope but sometimes of ribbon) around her neck, or arm. Often the purchaser was arranged in advance, and the sale was a form of symbolic separation and remarriage, as in a case from Maidstone, where in January 1815 John Osborne planned to sell his wife at the local market. However, as no market was held that day, the sale took place instead at "the sign of 'The Coal-barge,' in Earl Street", where "in a very regular manner", his wife and child were sold for £1 to a man named William Serjeant. In July the same year a wife was brought to Smithfield market by coach, and sold for 50 guineas and a horse. Once the sale was complete, "the lady, with her new lord and master, mounted a handsome curricle which was in waiting for them, and drove off, seemingly nothing loath to go." At another sale in September 1815, at Staines market, "only three shillings and four pence were offered for the lot, no one choosing to contend with the bidder, for the fair object, whose merits could only be appreciated by those who knew them. This the purchaser could boast, from a long and intimate acquaintance."
Although the initiative was usually the husband's, the wife had to agree to the sale. An 1824 report from Manchester says that "after several biddings she [the wife] was knocked down for 5s; but not liking the purchaser, she was put up again for 3s and a quart of ale". Frequently the wife was already living with her new partner. In one case in 1804 a London shopkeeper found his wife in bed with a stranger to him, who, following an altercation, offered to purchase the wife. The shopkeeper agreed, and in this instance the sale may have been an acceptable method of resolving the situation. However, the sale was sometimes spontaneous, and the wife could find herself the subject of bids from total strangers. In March 1766, a carpenter from Southwark sold his wife "in a fit of conjugal indifference at the alehouse". Once sober, the man asked his wife to return, and after she refused he hanged himself. A domestic fight might sometimes precede the sale of a wife, but in most recorded cases the intent was to end a marriage in a way that gave it the legitimacy of a divorce. In some cases the wife arranged for her own sale, and even provided the money for her agent to buy her out of her marriage, such as an 1822 case in Plymouth.
Such "divorces" were not always permanent. In 1826 John Turton sold his wife Mary to William Kaye at Emley Cross for five shillings. But after Kaye's death she returned to her husband, and the couple remained together for the next 30 years.
Mid-19th century It was believed during the mid-19th century that wife selling was restricted to the lowest levels of labourers, especially to those living in remote rural areas, but an analysis of the occupations of husbands and purchasers reveals that the custom was strongest in "proto-industrial" communities. Of the 158 cases in which occupation can be established, the largest group (19) was involved in the livestock or transport trades, fourteen worked in the building trade, five were blacksmiths, four were chimney-sweeps, and two were described as gentlemen, suggesting that wife selling was not simply a peasant custom. The most high-profile case was that of Henry Brydges, 2nd Duke of Chandos, who is reported to have bought his second wife from an ostler in about 1740.