Wife selling in England was a way of ending an unsatisfactory marriage by mutual agreement that probably began in the late 17th century. After parading his wife with a halter around her neck, arm, or waist, a husband would publicly auction her to the highest bidder. Wife selling provides the backdrop for Thomas Hardy’s 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge.
About Wife selling (English custom) in brief
Wife selling in England was a way of ending an unsatisfactory marriage by mutual agreement that probably began in the late 17th century. After parading his wife with a halter around her neck, arm, or waist, a husband would publicly auction her to the highest bidder. Wife selling provides the backdrop for Thomas Hardy’s 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, in which the central character sells his wife. 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. 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. Until the passing of the Marriage Act of 1753, a formal ceremony of marriage before a clergyman was not a legal requirement in England. 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. 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’ It was often claimed to be common in rural England, but cleric and folkloricist Sabine Baring-Gould dedicated a whole chapter to it in his book on Devonshire folklore.
As a child he witnessed the local poet return from market with a bought wife, and when confronted by the local JP and vicar he claimed the sale had been carried out correctly and that it had been both legal and Christian. In 1901, jurist and historian James Bryce, writing in 1901, said wife sales were still occasionally taking place during his time. 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’s lower classes.” In the early modern period of English history, five distinct methods of breaking up a marriage existed. One was to sue in the ecclesiastical courts for separation from bed and board, on the grounds of adultery or life-threatening cruelty, but it did not allow a remarriage. The other was to obtain a private separation, embodied in a deed of separation. Finally, the popular notion of wife selling was an alternative to the less popular Respecting Laws of Marriage, whereby the wife was forced out of the family home or the husband simply set up a new home with his mistress. It was also possible to end a marriage by elopement, whereby the wife sold her husband a new wife, a less popular but less popular method of ending a marriage, but a possible alternative to ending a wife selling.
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This page is based on the article Wife selling (English custom) published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 03, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
