The Practice of “Wife Selling”

“No bid?” said the husband. “Good Lord, why she's cost me fifty times the money, if a penny. Go on.”

“Four guineas!” cried the auctioneer.

“I'll tell ye what—I won't sell her for less than five,” said the husband, bringing down his fist so that the basins danced. “I'll sell her for five guineas to any man that will pay me the money, and treat her well; and he shall have her for ever, and never hear aught o' me. But she shan't go for less. Now then—five guineas—and she's yours. Susan, you agree?”

She bowed her head with absolute indifference.

“Five guineas,” said the auctioneer, “or she'll be withdrawn. Do anybody give it? The last time. Yes or no?”

“Yes,” said a loud voice from the doorway.

All eyes were turned. Standing in the triangular opening which formed the door of the tent was a sailor, who, unobserved by the rest, had arrived there within the last two or three minutes. A dead silence followed his affirmation.

“You say you do?” asked the husband, staring at him.

“I say so,” replied the sailor.

“Saying is one thing, and paying is another. Where's the money?”

The sailor hesitated a moment, looked anew at the woman, came in, unfolded five crisp pieces of paper, and threw them down upon the tablecloth. They were Bank-of-England notes for five pounds. Upon the face of this he clinked down the shillings severally—one, two, three, four, five.

The sight of real money in full amount, in answer to a challenge for the same till then deemed slightly hypothetical had a great effect upon the spectators. Their eyes became riveted upon the faces of the chief actors, and then upon the notes as they lay, weighted by the shillings, on the table.

Up to this moment it could not positively have been asserted that the man, in spite of his tantalizing declaration, was really in earnest. The spectators had indeed taken the proceedings throughout as a piece of mirthful irony carried to extremes; and had assumed that, being out of work, he was, as a consequence, out of temper with the world, and society, and his nearest kin. But with the demand and response of real cash the jovial frivolity of the scene departed. A lurid colour seemed to fill the tent, and change the aspect of all therein. The mirth-wrinkles left the listeners' faces, and they waited with parting lips.

“Now,” said the woman, breaking the silence, so that her low dry voice sounded quite loud, “before you go further, Michael, listen to me. If you touch that money, I and this girl go with the man. Mind, it is a joke no longer.”

“A joke? Of course it is not a joke!” shouted her husband, his resentment rising at her suggestion. “I take the money; the sailor takes you. That's plain enough. It has been done elsewhere—and why not here?”

“'Tis quite on the understanding that the young woman is willing,” said the sailor blandly. “I wouldn't hurt her feelings for the world.”

“Faith, nor I,” said her husband. “But she is willing, provided she can have the child. She said so only the other day when I talked o't!”

“That you swear?” said the sailor to her.

“I do,” said she, after glancing at her husband's face and seeing no repentance there.

“Very well, she shall have the child, and the bargain's complete,” said the trusser. He took the sailor's notes and deliberately folded them, and put them with the shillings in a high remote pocket, with an air of finality.

The sailor looked at the woman and smiled. “Come along!” he said kindly. “The little one too—the more the merrier!” She paused for an instant, with a close glance at him. Then dropping her eyes again, and saying nothing, she took up the child and followed him as he made towards the door. On reaching it, she turned, and pulling off her wedding-ring, flung it across the booth in the hay-trusser's face.

“Mike,” she said, “I've lived with thee a couple of years, and had nothing but temper! Now I'm no more to 'ee; I'll try my luck elsewhere. 'Twill be better for me and Elizabeth-Jane, both. So good-bye!”

Seizing the sailor's arm with her right hand, and mounting the little girl on her left, she went out of the tent sobbing bitterly.

A stolid look of concern filled the husband's face, as if, after all, he had not quite anticipated this ending; and some of the guests laughed.

“Is she gone?” he said.

“Faith, ay! she's gone clane enough,” said some rustics near the door.

The Mayer of Casterbridge : The Life and Death of a Man of Character. By Thomas Hardy, 1886.

Wikipedia

On June 2, 1828, inside the George and Dragon pub in Tonbridge, England, John Savage paid George Skinner one shilling and a pot of beer for his wife, Mary. George ordered his beer, and John left with Mary. The pair held hands as they went to start their new life together.

This wasn’t an unusual scene. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, English wives were “sold” for a variety of payments. Prices varied—“as low as a bullpup and a quarter of rum” all the way to “forty [British] pounds and a supper,” the North-Eastern Daily Gazette reported in 1887.

Half a gallon was the total sale price for a 26-year-old known as Mrs. Wells, purchased by a Mr. Clayton in 1876, as reported by The Sheffield Daily Telegraph. Clayton approached Mr. Wells, professed his love for the man’s wife, and asked if he could marry her. Wells shrugged—for the last two years, his wife had lived with Clayton, and he didn’t care what she did anymore. He told Clayton he could have her “for nowt” (or “nothing”), but Clayton insisted he name his price—he did not want her “so cheaply.” Wells countered with a half-gallon (four pints) of beer, and the three of them went off to the pub. After buying Wells his beer, Clayton also offered to adopt the Wells’s daughter—Mrs. Wells was rather attached to her—and when Mr. Wells accepted, Clayton bought him another pint. Mrs. Wells was so pleased with the arrangement that she purchased an additional half gallon of beer, which the three drank together.

“[Wife] sales were located at inns, ratifying pledge cups were quaffed and purchase prices were often in alcohol,” wrote historian Samuel Pyeatt Menefee, in his 1981 book Wives for Sale. “In several cases liquor appears to have played an inordinately large role, often serving as the total purchase price.” In 1832, a sand-carrier named Walter sold his wife at Cranbook Market in Kent for one glass of gin, one pint of beer, and his eight-year-old son; other sales are known to have been brokered with rum, brandy, whisky, cider, a home-cooked dinner, and a Newfoundland dog. When money was involved, it tended not to be very much, even by the standards of the day. In 1825, for instance, a wife in Yorkshire was sold for one pound and one shilling, and one in Somerset for two pounds and five shillings, while a corpse sold to a medical school went for the much higher sum of four pounds and four shillings. (This isn’t to say that the wife was a valueless commodity to be traded, but that the sale was more a formality than a business venture.) Despite these other tenders, beer—by the pint, quart, and gallon—was the most-common currency. 

These drink sales had more to do with the lack of divorce options than a bottomless love of booze. In 1857, the U.K. Parliament created the Matrimonial Causes Act, which allowed divorces in certain circumstances. Husbands could be granted a divorce if they had proof of their wife’s infidelity; wives had the added burden of proving incestuous or abusive behavior. Prior to this act, limited as it was, there were even fewer options for ending a marriage in England. You could petition the church or government for a decree, or desert your spouse. Middle-class couples might opt for private separation, which often included a deed stipulating that the ex-husband continue to funnel money to his former wife. Otherwise, desertion often left women impoverished. 

Ostensibly, the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act addressed this problem, but it was still too expensive for the majority of working-class folks. For many unhappy couples, wife-selling was viewed as an easy pathway to divorce, at a time when legally separating was often out of reach. “The practice in England was not really a sale, but rather a sort of customary divorce plus remarriage in which a woman who had committed adultery was divorced by her husband and given to her partner in adultery,” says Matthew H. Sommer, a Department of History Chair at Stanford University and author of Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China. Officially divorcing would have cost around £40-60 in an era when nursemaids earned £17 pounds a year. This arrangement benefited all parties—the wife got out of a miserable marriage, her new husband got a partner, and her ex got his buzz on. 

At the time, alcohol authorized all kinds of deals. People across many fields—laborers, farmers, agriculture workers, and more—would seal contracts with a handshake and a pint of beer, “to wet the sickle and drink success to the harvest,” Menefee wrote. “In such ritual carousels, the connection of drinks with a change of state and especially with a contract is emphasized.”

Indeed, the process was generally viewed as binding. “The great majority of those who took part in wife-selling seem to have had no doubt that what they did was lawful, and even conferred legal rights and exemptions,” The Law Quarterly Review reported in 1929. “They were far from realizing that their transaction was an utter nullity; still less that it was an actual crime and made them indictable for a conspiracy to bring about an adultery.” (A murky understanding of the rules surrounding wife-selling is a plot point in Thomas Hardy’s 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge: The Life and Death of a Man of Character.)

Twenty-five-year-old Betsy Wardle learned that lesson the hard way. In 1882, her husband sold her to her lover, George Chisnall, for a pint of beer. The pair married, but Betsy was soon charged with bigamy, arrested, and brought to Liverpool Crown Court to stand trial. When Betsy’s landlady, Alice Rosely, took the stand as a witness, she told the judge that she knew of the ale sale, but believed it was legal to house the couple. “Don’t do this again,” Justice Denman warned her. “Men have no right to sell their wives for a quart of beer or for anything else.” He sentenced Betsy to a week of hard labor.

In 2019, it all looks terribly misogynistic. Menefee reported that some sales hinged on complaints about a woman’s barrenness or her “nagging”—suggesting that a man wanted a younger or more submissive partner. Some of the visuals are also especially hard to stomach: In satirical cartoons of the era, husbands were shown to peddle their wives at busy Smithfield Market in London wearing halters—the same way they’d transport livestock—or ribbons that would tie them to their new ‘owner.’ Some of these cartoons were based on real events.

But despite the sexist overtones, women were often on board with the process. In his 1993 book, Customs in Common, historian Edward Thompson indicates that the sales were often approved by the women, reporting that out of 218 wife sales he had analyzed between 1760 and 1880, 40 were cases where women were “sold” to their existing lovers, and only four “sales” were recorded as being non-consensual. He did note that consent was sometimes forced, or the best of a number of unappealing options, as was the case in 1820, when one wife stated that her husband had “ill-treated her so frequently that she was induced to submit to the exposure [of the ritual] to get rid of him.” (However, Thompson added, the wife had lived with the purchaser for two years before the sale.) Writing in the Review of Behavioral Economics in 2014, economics scholar Peter Leeson noted that wives could also veto the buyer. Menefee also notes that many of the purchasers had “more remunerative, socially prestigious positions,” than the sellers, suggesting that upward social mobility may have played a part.

Though many accounts seem to indicate that wife-selling usually worked out fairly well for the women, wives’ voices are rarely heard in the historical accounts, which end around 1905. Most of the narratives are told from men’s perspectives. Of course, it wasn’t a panacea for all of the problems faced by women of the era, married or not—they still faced high-rates of mortality in childbirth, had limited educational offerings, and were expected to defer to men. For those who willingly entered into the sale, though, it may have been a start.

When Divorce Was Off the Table, English Couples Dissolved Their Marriages With Beer. By Zara Stone.   Atlas Obscura  , February 13, 2019

George Wray tied a halter around his wife’s waist and headed to the nearest market. He wasn’t there to buy anything—he was there to sell his wife.

Onlookers shouted as he auctioned her off to the highest bidder, William Harwood. After Harwood turned over a single shilling to Wray, he put his arm around his purchase. “Harwood walked off arm in arm with his smiling bargain,”reported an onlooker, “with as much coolness as if he had purchased a new coat or hat.” It was 1847, and Wray had just gotten the equivalent of a divorce.

The scene sounds like an elaborate joke. In reality, it was anything but. Between the 17th and 19th centuries, divorce was prohibitively expensive. So some lower-class British people didn’t get them—they sold their wives instead. The custom seems outlandish today, but it could be found in public places like markets, taverns and fairs. Historians disagree on when or how the custom started and how widespread it was, but it seems to have been an accepted alternative divorce among lower-class Britons. Wife sales were crude and funny, but they also served a very real purpose since it was so hard to get a divorce.

If your marriage broke up in the 1750s, you had to obtain a private Act of Parliament—essentially, an exception to Britain’s draconian divorce law—to formally divorce. The process was expensive and time-consuming, so wife-selling arose as a form of faux divorce. It wasn’t technically legal, but the way it unfolded in public made it valid in the eyes of many.

People could simply abandon one another, but a woman who entered into relationships with other people were in constant danger of their previous husband swooping in to punish her new lover and get some money in the process. Legally, her husband could demand that his wife’s lover pay him a large amount of money for having sexual relations with his wife, a right she lacked since courts didn’t allow wives to sue their husbands for adultery. Wife sales were a way to sidestep that risk.

Oddly enough, the sales took on the form of cattle auctions of the time. After announcing the sale, the man would put a ribbon or a rope around his wife’s neck, arm or waist and lead her to “market” (either an actual market or another public place). Then, he’d auction her off, often after declaring her virtues to the onlookers. Once she was purchased by another man, the previous marriage was considered null and void and the new buyer was financially responsible for his new wife.

Usually, wife sales were merely symbolic—there was just one bidder, the woman’s new lover. Sometimes there wasn’t a designated buyer, though, and an actual bidding war broke out. Men could announce a wife sale without informing their wife, and she might be bid on by total strangers. But women had to agree to the sale.

It would seem that the woman was at a disadvantage during a wife sale, but that wasn’t always the case. Since she was still married to her first husband under the law, he was technically entitled to all of her possessions (at the time, married women’s property all belonged to their husbands). The public nature of the sale, though, made it clear to one and all that the seller gave up his right to his former wife’s possessions. And the woman also sidestepped the very real threat of having her new lover sued by her first husband for “criminal conversation.”

“Through the sale,”writes legal scholar Julie C. Suk, “the first husband extracted a bribe from the wife’s lover in return for waiving his civil cause of action for criminal conversation.”

Public humiliation also played a role. Treating his cheating or estranged wife like a cow—even announcing her weight in public and bartering her like a farm animal—seems to have satisfied many bitter husbands. But usually, wife sales didn’t end in enmity. The wife, her new husband and her old one usually sat down for a pint of beer and a good laugh.

Overall, writes historian Lawrence Stone, the format of the sale was designed to seem legit. “All this elaborate symbolism had a very real purpose, which was to try to make the sale appear as legally binding as possible, especially with respect to any future financial responsibility by the husband for the wife,” he writes. Some wife sellers even drew up elaborate contracts to make the ritual seem as sale-like as possible.

Technically, though, wife sales didn’t dissolve the underlying marriage, and police eventually began breaking up the sales. Stone thinks that the practice was extremely rare, and that it attracted more attention than it deserves because of the temptation to spread word of the strange ritual far and wide—and even to make up fictional wife sales to sell newspapers. “In the end, ”writes historian Roderick Phillips, “too little is known about wife sales to enable us to draw firm conclusions.”

What is clear, though, is that attending, talking about, and inventing wife sales was amusing indeed. Even the seller and his wife were usually described as gleeful and happy during the sale.

Take Joseph Thompson, who allegedly sold his wife in 1832,listed his wife’s bad qualities, calling her “a born serpent” and advising the buyers to “avoid frolicsome women as you would a mad dog, a roaring lion, a loaded pistol, cholera.” Then he listed her assets, which included the ability to milk cows, sing, and serve as a drinking companion. “I therefore offer here with all her perfections and imperfections, for the sum of fifty shillings,” he concluded, adding a fun flourish to the end of his marriage.

Wife sales largely ended in 1857 when divorce became easier. With it died a custom—and tales of the tradition are just as bizarre and entertaining as they were then.

English Men Once Sold Their Wives Instead of Getting Divorced. By Erin Blakemore.

History, June 7, 2018.

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