Wife selling

Wife selling, yes you read that right!

It sounds like a joke, but it was anything but. Divorce was prohibitively expensive and reserved for the upper class, so when some lower-class people couldn’t get it, they sold their wives instead!

The process had no basis in law and frequently resulted in prosecution, particularly from the mid-19th century onward, but generally, the attitude of the authorities was ambiguous.

Historians disagree on when exactly or how the custom started and how widespread it was, but there were reported cases of it going back as far as the 1300s. It seems to have been an accepted alternative to divorce among the lower class. In most cases, the sale was announced in advance and usually took the form of an auction, often at a local market, to which the wife would be led by a halter, usually a rope or a ribbon, around her neck or arm. Often, the buyer was arranged in advance, and the sale was a form of symbolic separation and remarriage.

The husband would sell his wife in auction style after declaring her virtues to the onlookers. After the sale, the previous marriage was considered null and void, and the new buyer was financially responsible for his new wife.

Most of the time, there was just one bidder, the wife’s lover. Sometimes, though, an actual bidding war could break 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 for it to be completed.

Since she was still legally married to her first husband under the law, he was technically entitled to all of her possessions. 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 being accused of adultery or having her lover sued.

Towards the end of the 19th century, wife selling seemed to have become frowned upon even among the lower classes, and the police began to break up such sales. It was a rare and often amusing affair with the wife, and both new and old husbands sitting down for a pint of ale after the sale. Wife sales largely ended in 1857, when divorce became easier.

Sources:

The Selling of Wives, Customs in Common, E. P. Thompson

Road to Divorce: England 1530–1987, Lawrence Stone,

Dissolving Wedlock, Colin Gibson

Studies in history and jurisprudence, Volume II, James Bryce