The ritual wife sale was probably an “invented traditon”.11 It may not have been invented until the late seventeenth century and possibly even later. Certainly there were instances of wives being sold before 1660, but I know of none before the eighteenth century which affords clear evidence of the public auction and the halter.22
The symbolism was derived from the market, but not necessarily (at first) from the beast market. Several early cases are of sale by weight, the best-documented (which rests on churchwardens’ presentments) being from Chinnor (Oxfordshire) in 1696, where Thomas Heath, a maltster, was presented (and did penance) for selling his wife at “2d.q.” the 1b.33 This suggests that the transaction at first borrowed the forms of the malt, cheese or butter market, and subsequently (halter, auction, turnpike gates, tolls, the pens) those of the cattle market or horse fair.
This suggests, not an ancient custom of forgotten origin transmitted down the centuries, but the pressure of new needs seeking for a ritual as outlet. An explanation suggested by nineteenth-century observers was that wife selling was a consequence of wars, with the separations and the new attachments that resulted. This was especially noted at the end of the French Wars:
In the manufacturing districts in 1815 and 1816 hardly a market day passed without such sales month after month. The authorities shut their eyes at the time, and the people were confirmed in the perfect legality of the proceedings.11
There is some evidence as to sales of this kind, when a long-absent (or supposedly-dead) husband returned from the sea or from the wars to find his wife with a new husband and family.22 The French Wars, when multitudes were uprooted from their parishes, will have multiplied these occasions. Many wives, like Margaret in Wordsworth’s “The Ruined Cottage”, will have been left behind without news —
But such cases count for only a small minority of our collection. The majority of wife sales were not occasioned by wars.
They were occasioned by the breakdown of marriages, and were a device to enable a public divorce and re-marriage by the exchange of a wife (not any woman) between two men. For such a device to be effective required certain conditions: the decline in the punitive invigilation over sexual conduct of the church and its courts: the assent of the community, and a measure of autonomy of plebeian culture from the polite: a distanced, inattentive or tolerant civil authority. These conditions were met in England through much of the eighteenth century, in which the ritual struck root and became established.
One scarcely needs to explain that marriages break down and that some form of divorce is a convenience. There was, of course, no such divorce available to the English or Welsh people at this time. The alternative might be informal exchanges and cohabitations. In practice the absence of forms had usually favoured the male partner, who could — as poor law and Sessional records testify — far more easily desert his wife and children than she could desert them. The man might be able to take with him some trade; once hidden in the city from the pursuit of the overseers of the poor he might set up with a new “common law” partner. The wife’s outlet from an impossible or violent marriage was normally to the home of her parents or kin — unless she had already found herself a new lover.
There were suggestions among historians of fifty years ago that a great part of the labouring people in the eighteenth century lived in normless and formless animal promiscuity, and although this lampoon has been a good deal revised, some echoes of it still survive. The wife sale has sometimes been offered as an exemplar of this brutalism. But, of course, this is exactly what it is not. If sexual behaviour and marital norms were unstructured, where would have been the need for this high-profile public rite of exchange? The wife sale was invented in a plebeian culture which was sometimes credulous or superstitious, but which had a high regard for rituals and forms.
We have noted already the strongholds of this kind of culture — those communities, sometimes described as protoindustrial, tightly-knit by bonds of both kinship and economic activity: colliers, cutlers, framework knitters and stockingers, the iron workers of the Black Country, weavers, those who served the markets and transport. It does not matter much whether church or common-law marriages were most in favour in this community or that,11 nor whether bastardy and pre-nuptial conception rates were rising. These indices do not tell us all that we might wish to know about the marital norms, expectations, reciprocities and roles of couples when once committed to a household and to children. A marriage (whether formal or common law) engages compulsions of kin, of neighbours, of work-fellows; it involves far more emotional interests than those of the two persons primarily concerned. We shall see, when we come to consider “rough music”, that the expectations of the community penetrated into the family home, directing and sometimes constraining marital conduct. The watchful eyes of kin and of neighbours meant that marital offences were unlikely to go unknown in the wider community. Marital disputes were often taken out of doors and acted out as street-theatre, with a voluble appeal to the neighbours as an audience of jurors.
This was not a Puritan culture, and Methodists and evangelical reformers were shocked by the licence which they imputed to it, and especially by the sexual laxity of the young and unmarried. But there is abundant evidence that the consensus of such communities was such as to impose certain proprieties and norms, and to defend the institution of marriage itself, or of the family household.
This household was an “economic” as well as a domestic unit; indeed, it is impossible to show where “economic” relations ended and “personal” relations began, for both were imbricated in the same total context. When lovers courted each other they were “sweethearts”, but when they were settled in the new unit they were each others’ “helpmeets”, a word which carries sentiment and domestic function or economic role in equal measure. It is wrong to suppose that, because men and women had a need for each other’s economic support, or for the support of their children in the daily work of the home, this necessarily excluded affection and gave rise to a callous instrumentalism. “Feeling may be more, rather than less, tender or intense because relations are ‘economic’ and critical to mutual survival”.11
Within such communities it was impossible to change marriage partners — and to move into a new household in the next street or the next village — without it being a cause for daily, continuing scandal. Separation, especially if children were involved, made a rent in the kinship netting and disturbed the working neighbourhood.11 It might seem to threaten other households. But the new couple might not be able to take the easy way out, by migrating to the nearest city and its more tolerant “anonymity”, simply because it was not easy. The trade (nail-making, frame-work knitting, colliery) might be local, no other employer might be on offer, no other cottage to rent. If they stayed in their own community, some ritual which acknowledged the transaction must be found.
I concur with the most careful historian of British popular marriage — John Gillis — that the wife sale was most strongly supported in these plebeian or proto-industrial communities; that in general it was not a peasant custom and “the rite itself was not meant to deal with marriages in which property was involved”;22 and that it declined in frequency in the large cities, “where people could separate and remarry without anyone knowing or caring” — an overstatement, since in any urban street people knew or made it their business to find out. In short, we have moved from a land-usage to a money economy: a marriage with household is set up from the joint savings of bride and bridegroom (perhaps as servants or apprentices) and not from dower or land-rights. But we are still in a communal world of a known working neighbourhood with its market nexus. And if the community is knit together by kinship and common work it also has strands of common culture, made up of strong oral traditions (which are essential to transmit folk rituals) and an inheritance of custom and anecdote which is often encoded in the dialect speech of the people.
One further reason why, in such communities, a rite which signalled divorce might have been necessary could lead us further into the psychic resources of those men and women than we are able to follow. But one may hazard that even when a couple had changed partners and removed to some other district, the more “simple” minded (as Hardy described Susan Henchard) would continue to feel acute mental discomfort if there had been no rite which unloosed them from their previous allegiance or oath. An oath could have a terrifying sanction, an inexorable obligation, upon men and women of this time; and the marriage vow carried with it a whole freight of traditional lore.
All this argues the need for some rite, and the rite itself has been sufficiently described. It can be seen as a bleak transaction, or as street-theatre, or as a shaming ritual. The nearest that we can get to a thick description of the whole affair is in a reconstitution by an observant journalist, who saw it as a comedy of manners of the Black Country (Appendix pp. 463-6). But the form was flexible enough to carry many different messages, according to the cases involved and the judgement of the public.
This can be illustrated by the function of money paid in the exchange. The sum passed varied from the merest formality to substantial damages. Here are some examples as they arise from my notes. In Stowmarket in 1787 a farmer sold his wife for five guineas. Then he presented her with a guinea to buy a new gown, and ordered the bells to be rung for the occasion.11 At Sheffield in 1796 a husband sold his wife for 6d. He then paid a guinea for a coach to take her and her purchaser to Manchester.22 In Hull in 1806 a man sold his wife for twenty guineas to a man who had lodged with them for four years: this looks like punitive damages.33 At Smithfield in 1832 the wife was sold for 10s. with 2s. commission to the drover. The wife was then released from the pens opposite to the “Half Moon” public house, which the three parties then entered, where the late husband spent the greater part of the purchase money in brandy and water.44 At Boston (Lincolnshire), 1821, a price of 1s., the husband returning 11d. to the purchaser “for luck”.11 But at the same place in 1817 a wife had been sold for three-farthings, and the husband “delivered into the bargain her paraphernalia, a shoulder of mutton, basket, &c.”.22
That it was a shaming ritual for the wife is explicit in the symbolism. Most wives (like “Rough Moey’s” in the Appendix) were at some point in tears. But because a wife is reported as “scarcely to be sustained from fainting” as she was being “dragged” in a halter to sale (Dartmouth, 1817) we cannot necessarily infer that she was an unwilling party to the exchange; we know, in this case, that she was sold to “her first sweetheart”, and her reluctance might equally have come from the shame of the public exposure.33 The humiliation might also extend to the husband who was acknowledging that he had been cuckolded. If the report can be trusted, Jonathan Jowett, a farmer near Rotherham (1775), braved his way through the transaction with a “ludicrous piece of business”. He agreed to sell his wife for twenty-one guineas to William Taylor, a potter, whom he suspected of being her lover, and he duly delivered her in a “regular procession”:
Jowett went first, having his head ornamented, by his own desire, with a large pair of ram’s horns gilded, on the front of which the following sentence was wrote in gold letters, ‘cornuted by William Taylor’; a broad collar was fixed about his neck by which a ring and a cord being fastened thereto, one of his neighbours led him. And the wife with a halter about her neck was led by her husband to the place appointed amidst the shouts of upwards of one thousand spectators — Jowett returned the purchaser a guinea for luck and both sides seemed pleased with the bargain.44
The affair was being performed in the public eye. Just as the condemned before execution, the parties were acting up to expected roles. But they were given licence to improvise their own lines. For the husband the theatre provided opportunities for saving face. He could ridicule and humiliate his wife in the patter of an auctioneer; or he could suggest good-riddance by asking a derisory price; or he could court a reputation for generosity, showing his goodwill by causing the bells to be rung, showering gifts on the new couple, or hiring a coach; or he could, like “Rough Moey”, signify a comic resignation — “We all on us know how the matter stands. It cawn’t be helped, so we needn’t be so savige about it.”
Not all partings were smooth. In a few cases the husband is reported as evincing anger or jealousy towards his rival. In other cases he “repented” the sale and harassed the new couple. A stocking-weaver in Ansty (Leicestershire) in 1829 sold his wife to another stockinger. A few weeks later he passed the new couple’s house and “saw her at work in a stocking frame, apparently very contentedly”. This sight of his former helpmeet now helping his rival enraged his jealousy, he came back with a loaded gun and was aiming it at her through the window when a passer-by intervened.11 Another case which ended in an unhappy parting took place in Goole market (1849). Here a waterman named Ashton had been an in-patient in Hull Infirmary with an infected knee; meanwhile (according to the report) his wife eloped with a paramour, taking with them a great part of the husband’s effects. On his release from the Infirmary Ashton tracked the couple down and a sale was agreed. The wife was made to mount a chair in the market-place with a halter around her waist. After a little “spirited” bidding,
The woman was eventually knocked down to her paramour for five and ninepence, when, snapping her fingers in her husband’s face, she exclaimed: ‘There, good for nought, that’s more than thee would fetch,’ and departed, apparently in high glee, with her new lord and master, the husband as they were passing him holding out his hand to her and saying, ‘Give us a wag of thy hand, old lass, before we part’.22
But that is not all that “savige”, and by no means as savage as things which commonly have gone on in twentieth-century divorce courts. Indeed, it is the language of moralistic reporters which sometimes seems more savage than the behaviour reported. As an instance here is a Yorkshire newspaper in 1829:
According to the usual custom [the husband] purchased a new halter, for which he gave sixpence, and having tied it round his wife’s neck, paraded her along the street, the impudent hussey being nothing loth to this public display of her attractions. A purchaser soon appeared, who bid eighteen pence for the woman and the rope, and her husband soon came to terms. A bargain was struck and the shameless parties retired amid the jeers of the assembled crowd, to a public house, where the money was spent, and the former owner of the slut drank to the luck of the purchaser, and the jade declared she was quite satisfied with the transfer, for she had ‘got the lad she loved’.11
Beneath this crippled language one can detect humour, generosity and independent minds.
When this was street-theatre, what was the role of the audience? The crowds were sometimes large — sometimes “many hundreds” were reported — but more commonly the usual market day throng. So far as one can infer the response of the crowd was dictated by their views as to the rights and wrongs of the particular marital case enacted before them. Where the husband was known to have ill-treated his wife, the new couple might be cheered on their way; where the husband was popular and it was thought that he had been betrayed by his wife and her lover, they might witness the scene with hisses and execrations. At Ferrybridge (Yorkshire) in 1815 the purchaser and wife were pelted with snow and mud.22 A North Yorkshire case, where an old man was held to have been betrayed by his young wife, resulted in the new couple being burned in effigy on the village green.33 And there are other cases of the rough musicking of the new couple, most of them after 1850, when the rite was falling into disuse.11 On other occasions the crowd appears to have defended the right of the parties to proceed with a sale. General Pillet witnessed an occasion at Ashburn (Derbyshire) during the French Wars, when a JP tried to prevent a sale and the constables were mobbed and pelted by the crowd. The crowd protected the sale from intervention in a similar way at Bolton (1835).22
It is one’s impression that, until the early nineteenth century, neither lay nor clerical authorities were overzealous in rebuking any of the parties. Some rural clergy and magistrates were well aware of the practice, and entries in baptismal registers can be found: “Amie Daughter of Moses Stebbing by a bought wife delivered to him in a Halter” (Perleigh, Essex, 1782).33 The magistrate who tried, unsuccessfully, to intervene at Ashburn, confessed to General Pillet that the grounds of his action were uncertain. He could act against the parties for disturbing the peace (“coming to the market in a sort of tumult”), but “as to the act of selling itself, I do not think I have a right to prevent it. . . because it rests upon a custom preserved by the people, of which perhaps it would be dangerous to deprive them”.44 A disciplinary tone becomes more evident after the Wars, with heavy and indignant censures from the courts and press, the break-up of sales by constables, and the parties haled into court.11 But it was not altogether clear what the courts could do with them.22 For in the eyes of the law the rite of wife sale was a non-event. (If it had been accepted as an event, this would have entailed bigamy.) Legally, the parties might have been taking part in a pantomime. Indeed, when a dispute between two parishes about the maintenance of three children came before the sessions at Boston (Lincolnshire) in 1819, it was held that at law the paternity must be with the wife’s lawful husband, John Forman, even though he had sold her to another man, Joseph Holmes, seventeen years before, had ceased then to cohabit with her, and two of the three children (the eldest of which was twelve) had been entered in the baptismal register as sons of Joseph and Prudence Holmes. Counsel argued that the sale of a wife was “a scandalous action”, that children born in wedlock must be taken to be those of their legal parents, and that “it would be monstrous to admit of a husband’s coming forward to bastardize the issue of his own wife”. The court upheld these views.33
Since all agreed that wife sales were “monstrous” and “scandalous” the courts could proceed for misdemeanours, although not felonies. We have already followed the fate of the unfortunate Charles and Mary Skinner and John Savage, as they took their way from poor law cottage or workhouse via the tap-room of the “George and Dragon” at Tonbridge to prison (above pp. 426-7). They were conducted there by a very grand indictment, drawn (vi et armis) in the manner of Kings Bench —
Being persons of wicked and depraved minds, and wholly lost to a due sense of decency, morality, and religion. . . did, with force of arms, at combine, confederate and agree together to bring into contempt the holy estate of matrimony. . . and to corrupt the morals of his Majesty’s liege subjects, and to encourage a state of adultery, wickedness and debauchery. . . di da di da di da. . . sold all his marital rights. . . di da di da. . . for a certain valuable consideration, (to wit,) the sum of one shilling and a pot of beer. . . di da tiddely pom. . . to the great displeasure of Almighty God, to the great scandal and subversion of the holy estate of matrimony, and of religion, morality, decency and good order, in contempt of our Lord the King, &c.11
These monstrous miscreants were especially privileged in their indictment. A Rutland purchaser had to be content with being indicted as “a person of most wicked lewd lascivious depraved and abandoned mind and disposition and wholly lost to all sense of decency Morality and Religion”, for which he was fined one shilling.22 It was less common for the wives to be harrassed by the courts, since the law supposed them to be acting under the cover or control of their husbands. As Menefee has shown, the matter only entered the standard magistrates’ reference books in the 1830s, at which time sentences of imprisonment (one, three, and even six months) were imposed.33
This may have done something to “put wife sales down”, although it is more likely to have driven them out of the market-place and into the pub. More influential, in the decline of the ritual, will have been the decline in its legitimacy within the popular consensus — the old plebeian culture was fast losing its hold, faced with criticism from within, and uncertainty as to its own sanctions and codes. The Radical and Chartist press viewed the practice as scandalous.44 Even Eliza Sharples, the “moral” (i.e. common-law) wife of Richard Carlile, who acknowledged the sale’s function as divorce, found the practice offensive and brutal: “How much better would a quiet separation have been, and each left to a new and free choice. While women will consent to be treated as inferior to men, so long may we expect men to be brutes.”11
By the mid-century, in the agitation which led up to the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 (which first established secular divorce procedures) there were more frequent comments on the double standards which permitted a difficult and costly divorce procedure to the rich, through the Ecclesiastical Courts and the House of Lords, but which denied these to the poor. Although — as Punch pointed out — the same procedure was free to the poor also:
At the Central Court, one Stephen Cummins, painter, is found guilty of bigamy. He sells his wife for six shillings, and ‘one shilling to drink health.’ That the transaction may be in due form, Cummins gives a receipt. The Recorder, sentencing Cummins to imprisonment and hard labour for one year, says, ‘Under any circumstances, it were a great public offence for a man to go through the ceremony of marriage with another woman, while his wife was living.’ But then the poor are so depraved — are so illiterate! They will not go to the Ecclesiastical Court — they will not appeal to the House of Lords. A legal separation, conveying the right of future marriage, is always to be had on proper evidence given, — and yet the poor will not purchase their remedy.22
Caroline Norton made the same point in equally angry terms: since the time of Henry VIII, the English method of divorce “has remained an indulgence sacred to the aristocracy”:
The poorer classes have no form of divorce amongst them. The rich man makes a new marriage, having divorced his wife in the House of Lords: his new marriage is legal; his children are legitimate. . . The poor man makes a new marriage, not having divorced his wife in the House of Lords; his new marriage is null; his children are bastards; and he himself is liable to be put on his trial for bigamy. . . Not always offending knowingly, — for nothing can exceed the ignorance of the poor on this subject; they believe a Magistrate can divorce them; that an absence of seven years constitutes a nullity of the marriage tie; or that they can give each other reciprocal permission to divorce: and among some of the rural populations, the grosser belief prevails, that a man may legally sell his wife, and so break the bond of union! They believe anything, rather than what is the fact, — viz. that they cannot do legally that which they know is done legally in the classes above them. . .33
By the 1850s the wife sale was a survival, in pockets where the old “plebeian” culture still endured. There is a late case, in Bradford (Yorkshire) in 1858, which suggests a moment of cultural insecurity, as the oral transmission of the forms is breaking down. Hartley Thompson offered his wife, “of prepossessing appearance”, for sale in front of a beerhouse in a Bradford suburb. By one account the couple, both factory workers, “had become mutually tired of each other, and, it is said, had been mutually unfaithful to their marriage vow”. A sale had taken place (it is not explained in what form) to the wife’s lover, Ike Duncan, also a factory worker. “However, it was afterwards discovered that some formality, considered essential, had been overlooked.” On the present occasion every possible formality was carried through. The bell-man was sent around to announce the sale. The wife appeared in a new halter, decorated with red, white, and blue streamers. An auctioneer was prepared on horseback. A large crowd assembled. But the owners of the factory in which they were employed prevented the sale by threatening to sack anyone who took part. Ike Duncan was kept in at work and the wife declared that “she would not be sold to any person. . . but Ike”. The sale was called off.11
From the 1850s onwards the practice retreated into the more secretive forms of paper contracts witnessed in the public bar. The latest case in my collection which specifically mentions a halter is Hucknall Torkard, near Sheffield, 1889, where “a leading member of the Salvation Army” sold his wife to a friend for a shilling and led her by a halter to his house.22 Paper contracts come to light more frequently: one Lincolnshire villager called at the Barton-on-Humber stamp-office to get a stamp on his.33 The exchanges were sad and sometimes furtive affairs, outside or inside the pubs. One witness recalled a sale outside a pub in Whitechapel: the husband “a wretched-looking fellow”, the wife “a respectably dressed woman, aged about thirty”; the landlord as auctioneer, and a young man who “it was understood would be the highest bidder”. The newly-united pair walked off, “the man with an air of bravado, and the woman with a sniff in the air”, while the ex-husband “looked glum, and [his] neighbours manifested neither sympathy nor approval”.11 In the Midlands and the North it was said that sales took place among navvies, some colliers, bargees, some labourers. All that ritual now seemed to demand was publicity. The press reported (1882) a woman sold by her husband for a glass of ale in a pub in Alfreton on a Saturday night. “Before a room full of men he offered to sell her for a glass of ale, and the offer being accepted by the young man, she readily agreed, took off her wedding-ring, and from that time considered herself the property of the purchaser.22
Folklorists and journalists in the 1870s and 1880s indicate that the sense of the legitimacy of the practice endured. The Standard in a leading article in 1881 claimed that sales still took place in pubs in the Potteries, in certain mining districts, and in Sheffield amongst steel workers. The halter was rarely used. “The seller”, wrote the editorialist, “the ‘chattel’, and the buyer all firmly believe that they are taking part in a strictly legal act of divorce and re-marriage”.33 On the same day the Home Secretary, Sir William Harcourt, was questioned about the matter in the House of Commons by an Irish Nationalist MP. His reply was curt:
Everyone knows that no such practice exists. [“Oh!”] Well, Sir, if hon. Gentlemen from Ireland know the case to be different with reference to that country, I have nothing to say. . .
But in the view of the Home Secretary in England the practice was “unknown”.44
VI
Wife sales have served to inspire eloquent exercises in moralism. In the nineteenth century the French, and other Continental neighbours, used them against the English in indignation or in jest. Americans also (wrote the feminist, Caroline Dall) “are anxious to understand this outrage. Is it possible that a government which forbids the sale of a negro cannot forbid the sale of a Saxon wife?”.11 Even the Anglo-Indian or “Eurasian” community, resentful of their twilight racial status, brought the matter up accusingly.22 The polite classes in England — as we have seen abundantly — in their turn accused the brutalised labouring poor.
Since the scanty evidence did not exactly “feel” like that, I commenced my research, and in due course took the makings of this chapter around as an occasional lecture. By the late 1970s I was regretting my choice, and I would have stopped giving it as a lecture anyway, even if I had not been distracted by other matters. For it was decided by some feminists that my lecture was a male reading of the evidence and was offensive to correct views of “women’s history”. American feminists in the tradition of Caroline Dall voiced this criticism most strongly. At one university which has a little reputation (Yale) a faculty member shouted out as I left the lecture-room that my lecture had been “a con trick”. On another occasion I was taken to task very forcibly by a scholar whom I greatly respect for suppressing the fact that the wife, when sold, was being cheated of her dower and attendant rights. But the evidence for this has not yet come my way.33
In short, it got about that I was taking around an anti-feminist lecture, and welcome parties were prepared. While British audiences were more good-humoured, I became weary of the hostile tone of questions — as if I was trying to pass some fraud over on the audience — and also a little hurt, since I had supposed myself to be on the side of women’s rights (a supposition as to which my questioners were anxious to disabuse me). So I put the lecture away. This kind of intellectual charivari is only to be expected after generations of masculine-inflected history; it is merited; and it is a small price to pay for the rapid advance in feminine readings and definitions.
What I had done was to arouse certain expectations and then disappoint them. My title, “The Sale of Wives”, had led the audience to expect a scholarly disquisition on yet one more example of the miserable oppression of women. But my matter did not (and does not) exactly conform to that stereotype. Indeed, my intention was to decode behaviour (and even inter-personal relationships) which had been stereotyped by middle-class moralists (mostly male). The matter of feminine oppression was a subordinate theme.
Perhaps too much so. Perhaps in this chapter it has been too much taken for granted. One cannot always be reiterating the elemental organisation of a society and its gender relations, just as, if one is always parsing the parts of speech, one cannot listen to what a sentence is saying. If all that one can find in the relations between men and women is patriarchy, then one may be missing something else of importance — and of importance to women as well as to men. The wife sale is certainly telling us something about male-domination, but something which we already know. What we could not know, without research, is the small space for personal assertion which it might afford to the wife.
Let us agree, without any reservation, that the wife sale took place in a society in which the law, the church, economy and custom placed women in an inferior or (formally) powerless position. We may call this patriarchy if we wish, although a man did not have to be head of a household to be privileged over most women (of his own class). Men of all classes used a vocabulary of authority, and of ownership, with respect to their wives and children, and church and law encouraged this. The wife sale, then, appears as an extreme instance of the general case. The wife is sold like a chattel and the ritual, which casts her as a mare or cow, is degrading and was intended to degrade. She was exposed, in her sexual nature, to the inspection and coarse jests of a casual crowd. Although sold with her own assent, it was a profoundly humiliating experience which sometimes provoked her fellow women to anger11 and sometimes called forth their sympathy: “Neer mind, Sal, keep yer pecker up, and never say die!” (below, p. 464).
Even if we redefine the wife sale as divorce-with-consent it was an exchange of a woman between two men22 and not of a man between two women. (There are, in fact, records of husband sales, but they could be counted on the fingers of one hand.)33 The fact that the ritual took place within the forms and vocabulary of a society in which gender relations were structured in superordinate/subordinate ways is not in doubt.
Yet there was something at work within the form, which sometimes contradicted its intention. Sales need not take place to the husband’s advantage. Nor should we suppose that the norms of these working people were identical to those prescribed by church and law — that gives rise to serious mis-readings. In these “proto-industrial” working communities the relations between the sexes were undergoing some change. It is not yet appropriate to use a vocabulary of “rights”; perhaps “worth” or “respect” are the terms we need. The worth of women in these hard-working households was substantial, as was their responsibility, and it brought an area of corresponding authority and independence. I shall suggest, when we come to consider rough music, that male insecurity in the face of this growing independence may explain some of the “skimmingtons” in the traditional West, with their obsession with cuckoldry and fear of women “on top”. And the robust women whom we have seen in the front of food riots scarcely fall into the role of abject victims — a role ascribed to them a few years ago in the orthodoxy of certain campus feminists.
To read the history of women as one of unrelieved victimhood, as if anything before 1970 was feminine pre-history, can make for good polemics. But it is scarcely flattering to women. I was disabused of this early in my career as an adult tutor when I was talking to a Workers’ Educational Association day school in a market-town in North Lincolnshire, and was waxing into condescending eloquence about women’s oppression. An elderly self-educated villager, with a keen weather-beaten face, became tense, and at length burst out: “We women knew our rights, you know. We knew what was our due”. And I realised with embarrassment that my callow emphasis on feminine victim-hood had been received by her and other members of the audience as an insult. They instructed me that working women had made their own cultural spaces, had means of enforcing their norms, and saw to it that they received their “dues”. Their dues might not have been today’s “rights”, but they were not history’s passive subjects.
Many years later I was at a conference somewhere in New England, when a speaker had been denouncing with great vivacity, and much applause, the sins of the author of The Making of the English Working Class “brackets male” and was indicating my omissions. It was all fair stuff, but my friend, the late Herbert Gutman, felt I needed some reassurance and whispered into my ear: “You know, these people are making the same mistake as some of the historians of the blacks did. They always wanted to show their subjects as victims. They denied them their self-activity.”11 Since Herb’s whisper was more like a growl, his comment upset five or six rows before and behind us. Never mind, he was right.
The wife sale was one possible (if extreme) move available in the politics of the personal of eighteenth-century working people. Yes, the rules of these politics were male-dominative, although the women in the community were the particular guardians of the institutions of the family. But it would seem that the women had the skill, on occasion, to turn the moves to their own advantage. I can see no reason why anyone should have supposed this to be an “anti-feminist” conclusion.
There are certainly victims among those sold wives,11 but far more often the reports suggest their independence and their sexual vitality. The women are described as “fine-looking”, “buxom”, “of good appearance”, “a comely-looking country girl”, or as “enjoying the fun and frolic heartily”.22 Sally, in the Bilston ballad of “Samuel Lett”, gives us the folk type of the sort of wife who might get sold:
And we may identify at least one wife sold (in Hereford market very early in the nineteenth century) who lives up to this type —
That was the woman who carried the bloody loaf in the bread riots. I saw it all. I saw her head the women to seize the load of grain. Old Dr Symonds told her to take the garter off her right leg and tie it to the fore horse, and let the team go, and they did. . . They made a fine song about them all, beginning with —
We are not told whether she was sold before or after this affray.22 But she does not sound like someone who could have been sold unless she had wanted that.
Another wife, who was sold in Wenlock market for 2s. 6d. in the 1830s, was quite decided about the matter. When her husband got to “market-place ‘e turned shy, and tried to get out of the business, but Mattie mad’ un stick to it. ‘Er flipt her apern in ‘er gude man’s face, and said, ‘Let be, yer rogue. I wull be sold. I wants a change’”.33
APPENDIX
The account below is from Frederick W. Hackwood, Staffordshire Customs, Superstitions and Folklore (Lichfield, 1924), pp. 71-3. He describes it as “a descriptive account of a wife sale at Wednesbury, upwards of a century ago, written and published by a spectator”, but no further details are given of the source.
“The town-crier, taking his stand before a low tavern, rings his bell to attract attention, and then gives notice in slow, deliberate phrases, that ‘a woman —and her little baby — will be offered — for sale — in the Market Place — this afternoon — at four o’clock — by her husband — Moses Maggs’.”
The announcement was received by roars of laughter, followed by loud “hurrahs,” for the worthy named was one of the most notorious characters in the town, and commonly known as Rough Moey. He was a stout, burly fellow of about forty-five; his face had once been deeply pitted by smallpox, but the impress of the disease had been literally ploughed out by deep-blue furrows, the result of a pit explosion. He had lost one eye, and the place of one leg was supplied by a wooden stump. Neither in feature nor in figure was he prepossessing.
Shopkeepers came to their doors to pass remarks on the bell-man’s announcement, and women with arms akimbo stood about the street in groups of two or three to gossip on the same subject. Other interested loafers adjourned the discussion to the nearest taproom. The crier moved away to repeat his announcement elsewhere, followed by a crowd of ragged urchins.
Just before the specified time a crowd gathered in the Market Place, in front of the White Lion, a well-frequented tavern, where four tall fellows, armed with cudgels, cleared a space, and kept back the eager sightseers from crushing upon a man, a woman, and an infant — the lions of the day.
The woman was younger than the man, probably about twenty-three, with as many good looks as was compatible with her situation in life, married, or “leased” to such a man as her mate. In her arms she carried a child about twelve months old, which was quite undisturbed by the uproar around. The woman was evidently in her best attire, her face was freshly washed, her hair was gathered behind in a bob and tied by a bit of blue ribbon, the ends of which floated behind in gallant streamers, no doubt in honour of the occasion.
Though a common hempen halter hung loosely round her neck, the end of which was held by her husband and master, she did not — to judge by her appearance — find the situation trying or unpleasant; and to such encouraging cries as “Ne’er mind, Sal, keep yer pecker up, and never say die!” she replied with a merry laugh, and such remarks as assured her hearers that she’d be glad to get rid of the old rascal, and that it served her right for marrying such an old vagabond.
Then some sort of order having been obtained, some ale was sent for, two tubs were brought out into the space and up-ended by the four stout fellows, on one of which the woman and her child were mounted, and on the other the man took his stand. While the ale was being consumed by the principals, a fiddler was brought in to enliven the proceedings with a merry tune or two.
During the interlude, inquiries among the crowd by the recording inspector, elicited these facts. That Rough Moey had given a sturdy pit wench, about half his own age, a new gown and other articles of dress, with a fortnight’s treat, to marry him. That after a time she had transferred her affections to a good looking young collier; upon which the husband naturally became jealous and took to beating her. This, instead of curing her, only awakened thoughts of retaliation; and, as Moey often came home at night in a state of helpless intoxication, she would gently unstrap the wooden leg of the sleeping drunkard and thrash him with it to her heart’s content. At last, tiring of this state of affairs, the discomfited husband had resolved to put an end to it by the only means known to him, that of making a “lawful” transfer of an undesired wife, by selling her to her admirer in open market.
The fiddling having ceased, the attention of the crowd was concentrated on the principal actors in the scene. The man, holding the halter in his left hand, raised aloft a quart jug full of ale in the other, and with a sly wink of his single eye, said in a loud throaty voice, “Laerdies an’ gentlemin, ‘ere’s all yoar good ’ealths!” — and taking a long, long draught, finished with a long sigh of satisfaction, “Ah-h-h!” while inverting the jug to show that it was empty. A number of his friends (or “butties”, as he called them) responded with “Thank thee, Moey”; while some of the women shouted at him, “Well done, old lad!”
Near to the woman stood a stalwart young fellow, evidently the intending purchaser, who supplied her with ale. She was keeping up a running fire of wordy exchanges with the women around; but notwithstanding this attitude of bravado, her eyes were seen presently to fill with tears, and her bosom began to heave as if her heart were beating fiercely under the strain of suppressed excitement. Then her voice faltered, and hurriedly handing the child to the young man, she sat down on the tub, buried her face in her hands, and wept bitterly. Instantly all laughing ceased, the clamour was hushed, and a look of indignation spread over every woman’s countenance. Even some of the men seemed unable to suppress a sense of outrage, expression to which was given by the expectant purchaser, who hissed out in a savage voice, “Come, now, o’l chap, ha’ done with this foolery; and get on wi’ it!”
So old Rough Moey got on in this strain: “Laerdies an’ gentlemin,” he said, “we all on us know how the matter stands. It cawn’t be helped, so we needn’t be so savige about it.” Then fortifying himself with another drink, and winking hideously with his remaining eye, he continued: “Laerdies an’ gentlemin, I ax lafe to oppose to yer notice, a very handsome young ooman, and a nice little baby wot either belongs to me or to somebody else.” Here there was a general laugh, good humour again gaining the ascendant among the onlookers.
“Her’s a good cratur,” went on the amateur auctioneer, “an’ goos pritty well in harness, wi’ a little flogging. Her con cook a sheep’s yed like a Christian, and mak broth as good as Lord Dartmouth. Her con carry a hundred and a ‘alf o’ coals from the pit for three good miles; her con sell it well, and put it down her throat in less ner three minits.”
This sally raised another laugh, and the orator was rewarded with more drink. Thus refreshed, Moey proceeded: “Now, my lads, roll up, and bid spirited. It’s all right, accordin’ to law. I brought her through the turnpike, and paid the mon the toll for her. I brought her wi’ a halter, and had her cried; so everythin’s right accordin’ to law, and there’s nothin’ to pay. Come on wi’ yer bids, and if yer gies me a good price fer the ooman, I’ll gie yer the young kid inter the bargain. Now, gentlemin, who bids? Gooin’, gooin’, gooin’! I cawn’t delay — as the octioneer sez, I cawn’t dwell on this lot!”
The orator ceased, and a cheer rewarded his efforts. A voice from the crowd shouted “Eighteenpence”.
“Eighteenpence,” repeated Moey, “on’y eighteenpence for a strong and full-growed young ooman! Why, yo’d ha’ to pay the parson seven and six for marryin’ yer, an’ here’s a wife ready made to yer honds — an’ on’y eighteenpence bid!”
“I’ll gie thee half-a-crown, o’d Rough Un,” came from the young man whom all knew would be the purchaser.
“I’ll tell thee wot, Jack,” said Moey, “if thee’t mak it up three gallons o’ drink, her’s thine, I’ll ax thee naught fer the babby, an’ the halter’s worth a quart. Come, say six shillins!”
After a little chaffering the young man agreed to pay for three gallons of ale, which it was stipulated should be forthcoming at once, so that his newly-bought wife, himself, and a few chosen “butties”, not forgetting the obliging fiddler, should participate in the ratifying pledge-cup.
The bargain being thus concluded, the halter was placed in the young man’s hand, and the young woman received the congratulations of numerous dingy matrons. She wiped her eyes and smiled cheerfully; her new husband planted a sharp barking kiss on her rounded cheek by way of ratification, and as the new wedding party moved away the crowd broke up and slowly dispersed. The tragi-comedy of rude Black Country life was terminated.
1The Book of Days, ed. R. Chambers (1878), i, pp. 487-8.
2 Interesting comments on the practice appear as early as 1776, Courrier de L’Europe (26 Nov.). Thereafter the French press often carried examples with appropriate comment. See also [J. E. Jouy], L’Hermite de Londres (Paris, 1821), ii, p. 324; Anon., Six mois à Londres (Paris, 1817); and Piliet, note 1, p. 438 below. Many examples are cited in J. W. von Achenholtz, Annals, v (1790), pp. 329-30, ix (1796), pp. 187-8.
1 Thus wife sales find mention in J. Wesley Bready, England Before and After Wesley (1938), under a section headed: “Immorality as Sport”.
1 Hardy attributes Susan’s conviction to “the extreme simplicity of her intellect”: by the sale, her purchaser “had acquired a morally real and justifiable right to her. . . though the exact bearings and legal limits of that right were vague”.
2 I reported some conclusions in “Folklore, Anthropology, and Social History”, Indian Historical Review, iii, 2 (1978). For other reports, see J. Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society (1981) and Robert W. Malcolmson, Life and Labour in England, 1700-1780 (1981), pp. 103-4.
1 F. W. Hackwood, Staffordshire Customs, Superstititions and Folklore (1924), p. 70.
1 The quantities reported here are based upon my study as it stood in 1977. I have not attempted the difficult task of checking and conflating with the examples in the Appendix of S. P. Menefee, Wives for Sale (Oxford, 1981), (cited hereafter as Menefee), nor have I added cases which have come to hand since its publication.
2 My collection probably gives too much weight to Yorkshire (where I used to live and where A. J. Peacock kindly collected samples) and to Lincolnshire (where Rex Russell kindly did the same), and it may give too little weight to the West of England.
2 John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities, arranged and revised by Henry Ellis (1813), ii, p. 37, which adds: “It is painful to observe that instances of this occur frequently in our Newspapers”.
2 Cornwall may have been slow to adopt a practice widespread in Devon. A sale in 1819 in Redruth was reported as “the first of its kind” there: West Briton, 17 Dec. 1819.
3 For examples, Norfolk Chronicle, 9 Feb. 1805; W. Andrews, Bygone England (1892), p. 203.
4 Lawrence Stone is over-confident when he concludes (Road to Divorce, Oxford 1990, p. 148) that “fewer than three hundred cases of wife-sale occurred in all England during the peak seventy years from 1780 to 1850”. If this were so, it would be highly improbable that both Menefee and I should have recovered almost that number from a somewhat random sample of printed sources. In my view many sales, especially before 1820, will not have been recorded at all. Professor Stone underestimates the opacity of the plebeian culture to polite inspection (including his own): he is right, however, to say that wife sales were “very infrequent” as compared with the number of (male) desertions and of elopements: see ibid., pp. 142, 148.
1The Times, 2 Feb. 1819. The case from Rutland Quarter Sessions (Oakham) and perhaps an example was being looked for from the whole county? See also Roy Palmer, The Folklore of Leicestershire and Rutland (Wymondham, 1985), pp. 58-9.
2Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 4 May 1839; York Herald & General Advertiser, 27 Oct. 1838; Hull Advertiser, cited in Operative, 4 Nov. 1838.
1 It is probable that the duke of Chandos did buy his second wife, Maria, from an ostler in Newbury circa 1740, since the story clung to him persistently with circumstantial additions. But I am not convinced that Maria was sold in an inn-yard in a halter, nor that Chandos’s presence at the sale was a matter of chance: this detail rests on oral transmission across 130 years, see N & Q, 4th series, vi (1870), p. 179. See also Menefee, p. 214 (Case 15).
1 John Ashton, Social England under the Regency (1890), i, pp. 374-5.
2Wolverhampton Chronicle cited in Yorkshire Gazette, 28 Jan. 1865.
1 This much-reprinted example seems to derive from the Lancaster Herald, reaching The Times, 26 Apr. 1832, and the Annual Register for 1832. The colourful report was perhaps dressed up by the reporter: see Chambers’s Journal, 19 Oct. 1861.
2Stamford Mercury, 12 Mar. 1847. For a sequel, see ibid., 25 May 1849: Harwood refused to acknowledge (in county court) a debt contracted by his “wife” before purchase, “inasmuch as at the time he bought the woman, he did not take her debts along with her. The Judge (with astonishment): ‘What do you mean by buying the woman?’ The lady alluded to here stepped forward, and said she was purchased in the usual way. . . His Honour seemed to be dumfounded”.
1Preston Chronicle, 3 May 1817; Bolton Chronicle, cited in British Whig (Kingston, Ontario), 8 May 1835.
2 “This day a woman sold in the Market for 4/- the parties came from Stoke Golding”: Anon., “Memorandum Book of Occurences at Nuneaton” (typescript in Warwicks. CRO of original in Nuneaton Public Library), entry for 1 June 1816.
4Ibid., 27 Aug. 1833 and Man, 1 Sept. 1833, citing Bath Chronicle.
1 For example, Market Drayton Fair, Shrewsbury Chronicle, 27 June 1817; Bakewell Fair, Derby and Chesterfield Reporter, 14 June 1838; Horsham colt fair, 1820, 1825, and 1844, Henry Burstow, Reminiscences of Horsham (1911), pp. 73-4; Headley fair, W. W. Capes, Scenes of Rural Life in Hampshire (1901), p. 302. Also Menefee, ch. 3.
2 Sabine Baring-Gould, Devonshire Characters and Strange Events (1908), p. 61.
3 At a sale in Witney in 1839 it was reported that the woman was led three times around the market-place followed by hundreds of people, “the woman waving a blue handkerchief” and exhibiting “a most barefaced and disgusting effrontery”: Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 4 May 1839.
1 A husband took his wife one mile out of town before bringing her back in a halter to Arundel market, “he having been told that he must put the rope on at that distance, or the sale would not be legal”: The Times, 25 Dec. 1824.
2 I have at least 14 cases of tolls paid and accepted, and other cases of commissions to auctioneers or drovers, Menefee has others.
1 Frank W. Sterry, “H. Y. J. T.” [H. Y. J. Taylor] (Gloucester, 1909).
2 Most often cited is the supposed patter of a small farmer, Joseph Thompson, at Carlisle in 1832, who is supposed to have cautioned the crowd against “troublesome wives. . . Avoid them the same as you would a mad dog, a roaring lion, a loaded pistol, cholera morbus, Mount Etna”, etc. But then he went on to recommend Mary Anne — “she can read novels, and milk cows. . . make butter and scold the maid; she can sing Moore’s Melodies, and plait her frills and caps; she cannot make rum, gin or whiskey, but she is a good judge of the quality from long experience in tasting them” etc. (See below p. 416, note 1.) I think this speech (but not the sale) is a journalist’s invention.
1 Roy Palmer, with great generosity, has passed on to me many examples of these. Some are spurious or are mere excuses for sexual innuendo (listing the tools of each trade — “the cobbler bristled up his wife with two big balls of wax”). See also Menefee, ch. 11.
2 Jon Raven found this ballad in G. T. Lawley’s notes in Bilston Central Library. He recorded it to his own tune on his record Kate of Coalbrookdale (Argo ZFB29). See also Jon Raven, The Urban and Industrial Songs of the Black Country and Birmingham (Wolverhampton, 1977), pp. 143-4, 253.
1 Recollections of a “Nonagenarian” in Hereford Times, 21 May 1876; E. M. Leather, The Folk-Lore of Herefordshire (Hereford, 1912; reprint 1970), p. 118.
1Halifax Express, cited in The Times, 9 Feb. 1837.
2Wolverhampton Chronicle, cited in Globe, 27 Oct. 1837.
3Derbyshire Courier, cited in The Times, 22 Aug. 1837.
4See e.g. Derby Mercury, 3 Jan. 1844; Nottingham case in The Times, 23 Sept. 1834; Menefee, p. 279 note 32; London City Mission Magazine, Aug. 1861, p. 189.
1 Brit. Lib. Add MSS 32, 084 ff. pp. 14-15. My thanks to Douglas Hay for the transcription.
4 Menefee, pp. 115 and 117 suggests examples, but those I have consulted are inconclusive. In a Grassington case, 1807, the wife “refused to be delivered”: Annual Register, 1807, p. 378. In the case of a woman supposedly sold in the Grass Market, Edinburgh (1828), a broadside gives a lurid account of seven hundred women stoning and attacking the husband “in consequence of the insult the fair sex had received”: W. Boag, printer, Newcastle, Bibliotheca Lindesiana (1898), no. 1656. However an identical story, with the same seven hundred women, is found in a broadside in the Madden Collection (no. 1872), but is there attributed not to Edinburgh but to Liverpool. See also Menefee, Case 215, p. 239.
1 William Hutton, Poems: chiefly Tales (1804). Menefee, pp. 194-5 is quoting Hutton by way of a cutting of an article by G. T. Lawley (possibly “In the Good Old Days”, County Advertiser for Staffordshire and Worcestershire, 7 Aug. 1921): both get the poem a bit wrong and delete Hannah’s opposition to the sale (which she subsequently accepts).
2 Hutton’s Poems were in part reconstituted from manuscripts of thirty or more years earlier, burned with his premises in the Birmingham Riots of 1791. For William Martin, see Llewellyn Jewitt, The Life of William Hutton (1872), pp. 144-6; Catherine Hutton, The Life of William Hutton (1817), p. 128.
1 See e.g. Yorkshire Gazette, 3 Aug. 1833 (Halifax case of sale to own mother); Derby & Chesterfield Reporter, 12 Feb. 1835; Birmingham Chronicle, 7 Aug. 1823 (wife sold to her own mother).
2 Macclesfield case, reported in Lincoln, Rutford & Stamford Mercury, 7 Nov. 1817. Also Oxford case in J. R. Green, “Oxford During the Eighteenth Century”, in C. L. Stainer (ed.), Studies in Oxford History, xl (1901), pp. 218-9, which suggests that the purchaser may have been acting as agent for the Woodward of Bagley. In the only oral record of a wife sale which I have collected, the family tradition — as recounted by the wife’s grandson — is that the husband married her to get hold of her house, and then tried to sell her off. But “neighbours bought her in” and took her back to her parents’ home: account of the late Bob Hiscox (then aged 84) of Pilton, Somerset, given to me in 1975; the sale was in Shepton Mallet and was perhaps the case reported in the Castle Cary Visitor of September or October 1848 in which the husband was roughly handled by the crowd (information from John Fletcher, who introduced me to Bob Hiscox).
1 A young woman of Swadlincote whose husband had “some time since absconded” leaving her chargeable on the parish, sold in market by parish officer: Derby Mercury, 4 Feb. 1790.
1 R. Pillet, L’Angleterre vue à Londres et dans ses provinces (Paris, 1815), translated as Views of England, during a Residence of 10 Years, 6 of them as a Prisoner-of-War (Boston, Mass., 1818), ch. 33.
2Devon N & Q, iv (1906-7), p. 54. “Generally the affair was a pre-arranged one between the buyer, the seller, and the sold, who seem to have salved their consciences by going through the ceremony of a mock-auction”: “Better-Half Barter”, Chambers’s Journal, 19 Feb. 1870. The Laws Respecting Women, as they regard their Natural Rights (1777), p. 55, described sale as “a method of dissolving marriage” among the common people, when “a husband and wife find themselves heartily tired of each other, and agree to part, if the man has a mind to authenticate the intended separation by making it a matter of public notoriety”. “A purchaser is generally provided beforehand on these occasions.”
1 Somerset CRO, D/P/Stogm, 13/3/6 (Settlement appeals). My thanks to Dr Polly Morris, and to Mr R. J. E. Bush, Somerset Deputy County Archivist. See also L. G. Mead, “What am I bid?”, The Greenwood Tree, vol. 10, Autumn 1985 for a careful inspection of parish registers.
1Public Ledger, 23 Dec. 1822; The Times, 23 Dec. 1822; H. F. Whitfield, Plymouth and Devonport (Plymouth, 1900), pp. 296-7.
2 Baring-Gould, op. cit., pp. 59-60. In some cases the actors may have genuinely assimilated their ritual sale and Christian marriage forms. The Glouster Journal, 24 Nov. 1766, reported that a husband in Thorne (Yorkshire) had sold his “old” wife in a halter for 5s. to a neighbour. Both men then went to Doncaster for a marriage licence, and at the ceremony the first husband gave the bride away to her new husband. (The minister officiating knew nothing of the circumstances.)
1 See Eric Hobsbawm’s introduction to Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983).
2 Sir Keith Thomas, Martin Ingram and other correspondents have with great kindness passed on to me early examples of allegations of the sale of a wife. These appear to be private transactions which follow no one particular form. Dr Ingram, who is an authority on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century church court records, has encouraged me in my view that wife selling in its ritual fform is a creation of the very late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries: see Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570-1640 (Cambridge, 1987), p. 207.
3 S. A. Peyton, The Churchwarden’s Presentments in the Oxfordshire Peculiars of Dorchester, Thame and Banbury (Oxford, 1928), pp. 184-5. Other cases: Wife sold for 3/4d. a 1b (but in fact by “guess” at 7s. 6d.), Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 11 Mar. 1745; wife sold at Rowley (Staffordshire) for 1 1b 6 oz of bread by husband who is now “gone for a soldier”, ibid., 18 Mar. 1745; Case 33 in Menefee, p. 216, from Newmarket, 1770 of wife sold at 5d. a 1b.
2 E.g. Sherborne Mercury, 13 Sept. 1784 and Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 6 Sept. 1784 (Worcester case of husband returning from “some years abroad”); Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 20 Aug. 1785 (returned sailor, Liverpool); Independent Whig, 28 May 1815 (soldier returned after ten years); The Times, 10 Nov. 1838 (Dulverton, Devon — husband returned from transportation). In a famous Halifax case, the returned soldier sold his wife to the father of her three children, who was able to marry her only 25 years later, when the first husband had died. She was given away by her grandson: William Andrews, Curiosities of the Church (1890), pp. 177-8.
3 W. Wordsworth, Poetical Works (Oxford, 1959), v, p. 35.
1 The best overview is John R. Gillis, For Better, For Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present (Oxford, 1985); also R. B. Outhwaite (ed.), Marriage and Society (1981).
1 See my “Happy Families”, New Society, 8 Sept. 1977; H. Medick and D. Sabean, Interest and Emotion (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 9-27.
1 When children are mentioned in reports of wife sales, it is generally assumed that babies-in-arms and toddlers stay with the mother: occasionally a family is split, and the older (working age?) children go with the father.
4Sherborne Journal, 24 Aug. 1775. It was reported of a sale in Witney in 1848 that the wife was led by a halter to the market by her husband who wore a huge pair of horns: Gazette des Tribunaux, 22 June 1848.
2N & Q, 2nd series, i (1856), pp. 420-1. In Norwich when it was learned that the purchaser was already married and that he had turned his own wife out of door, he was hustled by the crowd: Norfolk Chronicle, 3 May 1823. Another pelting at Glastonbury, Sherborne & Yeovil Mercury, 21 Oct. 1833; Western Flying Post, 21 Oct. 1833.
3N & Q, 6th series, v (1882), signed A.J.M. —. This is A. J. Munby, whose MS Diary (Trinity College Library, Cambridge), iv, 27 February 1860, has the original story as told to him by “J.W. & Rev. J.S.”. Munby ends the account in his diary: “Such is the influence of modern refinement that the whole village are indignant, and have even burnt the pair in effigy on the Green. Poor things!”. (My thanks to Anna Davin for this reference.)
1 For an angry episode, see Bury Times, 12 Nov. 1870. The wife had “transferred her affections” to a neighbour on the other side of the street, whose own wife died five weeks before the sale. The wife had eight children, four of whom (“in the receipt of wages”) she took with her on her sale. After the sale first the wife was burnt in effigy in front of her new home, and the next day her purchaser; the report implies that women took the leading part in this rough music. Menefee has other good examples, pp. 117, 126.
3 See Menefee, Case 47, and pp. 270 and 198 note 16. Also entry in Formby Catholic Register for 9 April 1799 of birth of a child to James Wright and Mary Johnson: “This Mary Johnson was sold by her husband at formby Cross and purchased by Jas Wright for 15s and a crown bowl of Punch”, Lancs. CRO, RCFO I (1799), p. 7. My thanks to Robert Malcolmson.
1 A man was sentenced at Manchester to three months imprisonment and to the pillory in 1815 for selling his wife: Derby Mercury, 3 Aug. 1815. Judge Edward Christian in his Charges to Grand Juries (1819), p. 93, called for prosecutions against the “shameful and scandalous practice” then so prevalent, and suggested that seller and purchaser might be sent to the pillory. Since the pillory was abolished in 1816 (Geo. III, c. 178) this charge was presumably delivered in 1815 or before.
2 The practices were described as “mere pretences to sanction the crime of adultery” in the Birmingham Gazette, 1 Mar. 1790.
3Stamford Mercury, 12 Feb. 1819. For a similar decision at Warwick Quarter Sessions, see Warwick Advertiser, 15 Apr. 1809.
2 Palmer, The Folklore of Leicestershire and Rutland, p. 58.
3 See Menefee, ch. 8, and (for sentences) p. 299, note 24 and p. 300, notes 25 and 27.
4 See e.g. Northern Star, 3 Mar. 1838. But the Destructive and Poor Man’s Conservative, 13 July 1833, while finding wife sales “an outrage”, added that “there should be some immediate cheap method of separation provided by the Legislature for the humbler classes. . .”. Such a law would “put an end to such scenes”.
3Standard, 30 May 1881. Later cases are cited in Daily Mail, 1 Mar. 1899, Globe, 16 Nov. 1903, and A. R. Wright, English Folklore (1928) .
4Parliamentary Debates, 261, col. 1646-7, 30 May 1881.
1 Caroline H. Dall, “Woman’s Right to Labour” or Low Wages and Hard Work (Boston, Mass., 1860), pp. 44-6.
2 Herbert Alick Stark, Hostages to India (Calcutta, 1936), p. 78.
3 We know too little about the decline of dower among working people, although see Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England, 1300-1840 (Oxford, 1986), ch. 12. In a few cases wives sold in rural districts might have lost cottage property with common rights: see Bob Hiscox, above p. 436, note 2. J. F. Howson, rector of Guisely and Archdeacon of Craven (Yorkshire) recalled in the 1930s talking with an old man in his parish, who said: “A grandmother o’ mine wur sold that road, she were that. ’Ave ’eered my father tell abaht it many a time. They put an ’alter rahnd ’er neck, tha’ knaws, ’appen to maake it legal like. . . And worst of it wur. . . ’at we lost two cottages along of it, we did an’ all”. (Private communication to me from E. R. Yarham.)
2 Even this must be qualified, since (as anthropologists warn us) what is exchanged is not “a woman” but rights over a woman: see J. R. Goody, “Marriage Prestations, Inheritance and Descent in Pre-Industrial Societies”, Journal of Comparative Family Studies, p. 40.
3 There is a cryptic report of the sale of a husband in a halter at Dewsbury market cross, Cambridge Gazette, 26 Aug. 1815, Warwick Advertiser, 19 Aug. 1815. Another (1814?) in Drogheda was widely cited: e.g. Pillet, op. cit., p. 185. A broadside (Bibliotheca Lindesiana, no. 1631) has a circumstantial account of the sale of a shoemaker by his wife in Totnes, Devon, 1824, but I doubt this case, which looks like confected printer’s copy. There are a few bona fide cases of private contractual sales, for example of a husband who had left his wife to go to Australia: Birmingham Daily Post, 12 Jan. 1888.
1 In one sense Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery & Freedom (New York, 1976), is a massive correction of acounts of slavery which have understated the slaves’ cultural identity.
1 One wife who was sold at Spilsby (Lincolnshire) in 1821 was committed to the house of correction the next week for threatening to set fire to her former husband’s premises: Stamford Mercury, 7 Dec. 1821. There is a fierce denunciation of the husband who had sold her, published by Martha Barnard in a wall poster in Cambridge, July 1841: reproduced in Philip Ward, Cambridge Street Literature (Cambridge, 1978), p. 48.
2 Among many examples, British Whig, 8 May 1835; Leeds Times, 10 Aug. 1844; Derby Mercury, 11 Oct. 1848; John Hewitt, History and Topography of the Parish of Wakefield (1963). Also Menefee, p. 276 note 10.
2 The food riots were probably those of 1800. A wife was reported as being sold in Hereford in 1802 by a butcher for £1. 4s. and a bowl of punch: Morning Herald, 16 Apr. 1802.
3 C. M. Gaskell, “Old Wenlock and its Folklore”, Nineteenth Century, (1894).
