Wife selling (English custom)

Common card · No. 477091

Wife selling in England was a way of ending an unsatisfactory marriage that probably began at the end of the 17th century, when divorce was a practical impossibility for all but the very wealthiest. Although less than 400 cases of wife sales have been recorded, historians note that there were roughly as many wife sales as there were divorces by private acts of Parliament in the 18th and 19th centuries. The practice, though never legally recognized, followed a ritualized public form, often conducted in a marketplace or inn, with the wife led by a halter and "sold" to a new partner, thereby effecting a de facto, if not de jure, separation. Wife selling provides the backdrop for Thomas Hardy's 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, in which the central character sells his wife at the beginning of the story, an act that haunts him for the rest of his life, and ultimately destroys him. Although the custom had no basis in law and frequently resulted in prosecution, particularly from the mid-19th...

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