Let’s take a walk back in history for a bit and inject a little levity into our Monday morning. Ready for it? Here we go. Until the early 1900s, wife selling was actually a thing husbands in Britain were able to do. That’s right – wife selling. Husbands were able to sell their wives to the highest bidder.
Now before you get bent, let’s explore this little nugget of history. The golden age of wife selling lasted from about 1780 to 1850. There were about 300 wives sold during this period and those are the ones that were listed in the record books. Chances are there were plenty of other numbers that are not listed in those books.
The history books list Mary Whitehouse as one of the earliest recorded wife sales. Her husband Samuel Whitehouse sold her in 1733 to a man named Thomas Griffiths. The price was about one guinea (roughly equal to the modern day English pound). The paper comments that the deal required that Griffiths take her with all her faults.
Wife selling was a very public ritual. Wives were taken to the local market square with a halter on their neck and they were made to stand on the auction block as their husbands began taking bids. There was usually a crowd that gathered along with a lot of joking and jeering. Successful transactions would then retire to the pub for a celebration.
If you are wondering at what point you shouldn’t be outraged, here comes the part that actually makes some of this palatable. Most of the wives who were sold were not done in some humiliating display or out of some form of punishment. Most of them went because they wanted to go and they wanted to be sold – often times to either an existing lover or to a prospective suitor.
Wife selling was a faster, cheaper way of obtaining a divorce in a time period when divorce was ridiculously expensive and a very difficult procedure for ordinary folk to get. If the couple was that unhappy, wife selling freed them both from the misery of their condition while also providing some amusement value for the rest of the town.
So – while this little nugget of history sounds suggestively terrible on the surface – there’s a lot more hiding there when you dig down. The next time you start thinking that you’d like to sell your husband or your wife – you’ll know there’s actually a precedent for it.
What do you think of wife selling?