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Wife for Sale (England)

The English custom of selling wives was one of the forms of term of a marriage failed by mutual agreement in the late 17th century, when divorce was mainly impossible for all but the richest. After placing hoarseness around her neck, arm or chest, the husband could publicly auction her, selling her to the highest bidder. This practice is the plot of Thomas Hardy's novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, in which the protagonist sells his wife at the beginning of the story, an act that haunts him for the rest of his life and ends up destroying him.2

Although this practice had no legal basis and often entailed legal action, the attitude of the authorities was equivocal, particularly from the mid-19th century onwards. A magistrate at the beginning century claimed that he did not believe he had sufficient authority to avoid the sales of wives, while there are known cases of Poor Laws commissioners forcing husbands to sell their wives, rather than support their families in workhouses.

The sale of wives persisted until the early 20th century. According to the jurist and historian James Bryce, some of these sales occasionally occurred around 1901. According to evidence from a trial in County Leeds in 1913, a woman claimed that she had been sold to a co-worker of her husband for a pound sterling. This is one of the last known cases of the practice in England.

Marriage

Until the appearance of Marriage Act of 1753, a formal ceremony in the presence of a clergyman was not a legal requirement, and marriages had no record. All that was needed was for both parties to accept the union, as well as for both parties to reach the legal age for consent, 9 which it was 12 years for women and 14 for men. 10 Women were completely subordinate to their husbands after marriage; husband and wife became a legal entity, a legally known state as "coverage" (from the English term coverture) As the eminent English judge Sir William Blackstone wrote in 1753: "The very being, or the legal existence of the woman, is suspended during marriage, or at least, is consolidated and incorporated into her husband's: under those protective wings and shelter she is completely unsought".

Married women did not own themselves, but were actually owned by their husbands. 11 Blackstone then added, "Most of the limitations of women were intended for their protection and benefit.