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Wife selling - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Towards the end of the 18th century, some hostility towards wife selling began to manifest itself amongst the general population. One sale in 1756 in Dublin was interrupted by a group of women who "rescued" the wife, following which the husband was given a mock trial and placed in the stocks until early the next morning. In about 1777 a wife sale at Carmarthenshire produced in the crowd "a great silence", and "a feeling of uneasiness in the gathering".[47] Reports of wife selling rose from two per decade in the 1750s, to a peak of 50 in the 1820s and 1830s. As the number of recorded cases increased, so did opposition to the practice, which became seen as one of a number of popular customs that the social elite believed it was their duty to abolish. JPs in Quarter Sessions became more active in punishing those involved in wife selling, and some test cases in the central law courts confirmed the illegality of the practice.[48] Newspaper accounts were often disparaging: "a most disgusting and disgraceful scene" was the description in a report of 1832,[49] but it was not until the 1840s that the number of cases of wife selling began to decline significantly. Thompson discovered 121 published reports of wife sales between 1800 and 1840, as compared to 55 between 1840 and 1880.[38]


William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield viewed wife selling as conspiracy to commit adultery.Lord Chief Justice William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield, considered wife sales as conspiracy to commit adultery, but few of those reported in the newspapers led to prosecutions in court.[4] The Times reported one such case in 1818, in which a man was indicted for selling his wife at Leominster market, for 2s. 6d.[50] In 1825 a man named Johnson was charged with "having sung a song in the streets describing the merits of his wife, for the purpose of selling her to the highest bidder at Smithfield." Such songs were not unique; in about 1842 John Ashton wrote "Sale of a Wife".[nb 5][52] The arresting officer claimed that the man had gathered a "crowd of all sorts of vagabonds together, who appeared to listen to his ditty, but were in fact, collected to pick pockets." The defendant, however, replied that he had "not the most distant idea of selling his wife, who was, poor creature, at home with her hungry children, while he was endeavouring to earn a bit of bread for them by the strength of his lungs." He had also printed copies of the song, and the story of a wife sale, to earn money. Before releasing him, the Lord Mayor, judging the case, cautioned Johnson that the practice could not be allowed, and must not be repeated.[53] In 1833 the sale of a woman was reported at Epping. She was sold for 2s. 6d., with a duty of 6d. Once sober, and placed before the Justices of the Peace, the husband claimed that he had been forced into marriage by the parish authorities, and had "never since lived with her, and that she had lived in open adultery with the man Bradley, by whom she had been purchased". He was imprisoned for "having deserted his wife".[54]


A contemporary French print of an English wife sale. The scene is set at a cattle market, which both places it in the context of livestock sales and implies that the wife already has a lover, as the husband is shown apparently "wearing horns", a traditional symbol that he has been cuckolded.Wife selling was referred to in the 19th-century French play, Le Marché de Londres.[55] Commenting on the drama and contemporary French attitudes on the custom, in 1846 the writer Angus B. Reach complained: "They reckon up a long and visionary list of our failings [... They] would as readily give up their belief in the geographical and physical existence of London, as in the astounding fact that in England a husband sells his wife exactly as he sells his horse or his dog."[56] Such complaints were still commonplace nearly 20 years later; in The Book of Days (1864), author Robert Chambers wrote about a case of wife selling in 1832, and noted that "the occasional instances of wife-sale, while remarked by ourselves with little beyond a passing smile, have made a deep impression on our continental neighbours, [who] constantly cite it as an evidence of our low civilisation."[57] Embarrassed by the practice, a legal handbook of 1853 enabled English judges to dismiss wife selling as a myth: "It is a vulgar error that a husband can get rid of his wife by selling her in the open market with a halter round her neck. Such an act on his part would be severely punished by the local magistrate."[58] Originally published in 1869, Burn's Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer states that "publicly selling or buying a wife is clearly an indictable offence ... And many prosecutions against husbands for selling, and others for buying, have recently been sustained, and imprisonment for six months inflicted".[59]

Another form of wife selling was by deed of conveyance. Although initially much less common than sale by auction, the practice became more widespread after the 1850s, as popular opinion turned against the market sale of a wife.[60] The issue of the commonly perceived legitimacy of wife selling was also brought to the government. In 1881, Home Secretary William Harcourt was asked to comment on an incident in Sheffield, in which a man sold his wife for a quart of beer. Harcourt replied: "no impression exists anywhere in England that the selling of wives is legitimate", and "that no such practice as wife selling exists",[61] but as late as 1889, a member of the Salvation Army sold his wife for a shilling in Hucknall Torkard, Nottinghamshire, and subsequently led her by the halter to her buyer's house, the last case in which the use of a halter is mentioned.[60] The most recent case of an English wife sale was reported in 1913, when a woman giving evidence in a Leeds police court during a maintenance case claimed that her husband had sold her to one of his workmates for £1 (equivalent to about £70 in 2010).[29] The manner of her sale is, however, unrecorded.[20]