When is it legal to sell your wife?
Imagine you are an 18th century British man. Now imagine you are married to a woman. Now imagine that you can’t bear each other anymore. You would like a divorce, but it’s too expensive. Neither would killing each other seem to be a solution. There is another way out: sell her!
In 18th century Britain it was in fact quite easy to sell a wife. The husband simply had to bring her to the market square with a halter around her neck, arm, or waist. He would then publicly auction her to the highest bidder.
He made a quick speech or pitch before in which he would described his wife with all the gentle humour of a British gentleman: he’d speak of his wife with her qualities and vices and then, he would launch the auction.
When both parties had found an arrangement, they went together, ex-wife, new-husband and ex-husband (and any other participants) to celebrate the completed transaction in a local tavern.
you can’t bear each other anymore : vous ne pouvez pas supporter les uns les autres plus
there’s another way out : Il y a une autre sortie
gentle humour : l’humour doux
Here is an example of an announcement, from the article Wife Sales by Peter T. Leeson, Peter J. Boettke
and Jayme S. Lemke
Hello Constance. In Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (see here on Wikipedia) there is just such a wife auction. Victorianweb.org looks at this passage in some detail:
[It has been suggested that] the parties in the transaction (unlike those in The Mayor of Casterbridge) were all well-known to one another, and the husband, motivated by a desire for a quantity of beer, may have been an alcoholic, as Hardy intimates by Susan’s remarks as well as by Henchard’s teetotaling pledge that young Michael Henchard was. The halter around the woman’s neck, a demeaning detail to modern readers, undoubtedly connects the affair with the auctioning off of livestock at agricultural fairs such as that in Weyhill (Hardy’s “Weydon-Priors), held near Andover in Hampshire in the second week of October ever since Queen Elizabeth granted it a charter to do so in 1599.
In the 1997 Penguin edition (revised in 2003), Keith Wilson notes that Hardy copied into his “Facts from Newspapers, Histories, Biographies, & other chronicles” notebook (now in the Dorset County Museum, Dorchester) newspaper accounts of three such sales, in particular the Dorset County Chronicle, whose issues from the 1820s he explored in 1884 in preparing to write The Mayor of Casterbridge. Wilson remarks upon a particular article from the decade in which the tale is initially set:
Given the wife’s price and the horse-trading mode of her delivery, one of these entries, dated 6 December 1827, is particularly relevant: ‘Selling wife. At Buckland, nr. Frome, a labring [sic] man named Charles Pearce sold his wife to a shoemaker named Elton for £5, & delivered her in a halter in the public street. She seemed very willing. Bells rang.’ See Christine Winfield, “Factual Sources of Two Episodes in The Mayor of Casterbridge (Nineteenth-Century Fiction 25 [1970], 224-31. (Page 328)
Source: http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/hardy/pva283.html
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| Wife selling took place in 18th century Britain. |
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| Married couples would present themselves in the town square and, with or without the wife’s consent, auction the wife to the highest bidder. Sometimes, the wife’s lover would bid for her. |
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| The auctions would take place either as a cheaper or more accessible alternative to official divorce, or as a means to raise funds for a household in financial difficulty. |
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| The auctions took place further to financial troubles within the couple, frequent arguments, the presence of a lover or mistress, others upsets within the couple. |
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| Depending on the circomstances, the auctions were often theatrical. The man would give a lively sales pitch regarding his wife’s better qualities. She would participate, or not, depending on the level of consent she had given to the proceedings. |
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| The negotiations might be rather formal. The initial presentations rather theatrical. |
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| The auction might start with a degree of dialogue or banter with the audience before becoming more formal as in a classic auction. |
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| These events were, besides being formal auctions that lead with a persuading sales pitch, a kind of street theatre. This public display of matrimonial disharmony would certainly draw the crowds! |
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