Frolicksome Women & Troublesome Wives: Wife Selling in England

By Barb Drummond

In the late 18th century, the French claimed an Englishman tired of his wife could dispose of her at Smithfield’s beast market. Examples can be found scattered through press records. Some were, as often claimed, brutal, sometimes drunken affairs. But they varied widely over time, place, and practice. England was the only Protestant nation

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barb Drummond
• Release date: Sep 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9781912829064

Barb Drummond

Barb Drummond has been self publishing British history for several decades. She has done research for the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum and worked with the BBC.

Book preview

Introduction

A woman was sold in Sheffield Market Place with a halter round her waist. A man asked: ‘What do you ask for your cow?’ When told a guinea, he replied: ‘Done!’

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This account reads like an old vaudeville sketch, but it is from The Doncaster Gazette in 1803. How do we read it? More importantly, how was it read at the time? Was the paper mocking the people of Sheffield, as a rival northern city, or were those involved mocking something else?

Examples of English — and occasionally Scots and Welsh — men selling their wives are scattered through newspapers from the early eighteenth century. From the mid-nineteenth century these accounts were unearthed by editors and reprinted as examples of the backwardness and primitiveness of their ancestors, to show how great Britain had become. The press condemned the men who sold their better halves as ‘brutes’, and the taking of a woman to market in a halter and selling her to the highest bidder as degrading, humiliating and shameful.

Yet the same accounts often noted how meek the women seemed, with few showing any signs of opposition or shame. There were instances where women clearly approved of the transaction, and even some who seem to have initiated the event or demanded the sale go ahead. Some wives were fresh faced teenagers; others well past the first bloom of youth. Whilst the press claimed they were all ignorant and poor, a few were dressed in silk and lace, and one departed the scene in a fine carriage. Buyers and sellers sometimes shared a meal, a farewell drink, or spent the sales money and more on ‘a spree’. Prices varied from a few farthings to hundreds of pounds. There were even a few instances when church bells were rung in celebration.

The French often claimed that any Englishman tired of his wife could legally dispose of her at London’s Smithfield Market. This helped encourage the widespread view that the eaters of ’bifsteaks’ were a nation lacking morality and religious beliefs. The practice was mocked in print and was included in plays to indicate the brutishness of a male character. Sales continued throughout the Victorian era, when Britain was holding itself up as a beacon of enlightenment and Christian morality. And yet when the matter was raised in the House of Commons, the Home Secretary denied any such thing ever happened.

Sales often involved rituals and commercial practices which people believed made them legal. Documents were drawn up and signed, sometimes by attorneys. The auctions were held in open markets, and wives taken through tollbooths and tied up in pens in order to ensure the contract would ‘hold’.

The press often claimed the practice was illegal, though failed to mention on what grounds. Occasional punishments were handed out, with the use of stocks, prison and the treadmill.

What on earth was happening?

1

Origins

The English are an ungovernable race.

Voltaire (attrib.)

In 1814 officers of the parish of Effingham in Surrey tried to sell a poor woman of their parish, claiming it was ‘in accordance with the old system’ ¹ but failed to explain what this ‘old system’ was. Did they mean some local practice or were they merely acting on rumours, attempting to rid themselves of the responsibility to support a poor woman and her children?

Many accounts of wife sales claimed it was based on ancient custom. The only book dedicated to the subject is by Samuel P. Menefee who described a wide range of traditions such as trial marriages which allowed couples to separate and which he suggested were of ancient Celtic origin. These rituals are interesting enough, but most of those cited by Menefee were in Scotland and Ireland, places where wife selling does not seem to have been common outside the realms of folklore. He was an American, so was unlikely to be aware of the immense diversity of language, culture and traditions across geography and of time in these islands. The Romans and Normans suppressed local customs and the Reformation caused further social problems so local culture suffered. The Black Death, Wars of the Roses and the Civil War wiped out huge swathes of the population, reducing the numbers of people able to preserve and pass on knowledge and traditions. . The founding of new towns as a result of the Industrial Revolution, and movement of people from the countryside to urban centres and emigration to the various colonies further disrupted the local transmission of information and shared memory. When Alan Lomax was making field recordings of songs in the U.S.A., he found many that had died out where they had originated from in Britain. Could wife selling have survived all these upheavals into the modern age?

Most accounts of wife sales have come from local and regional newspapers, but until the relatively recent establishment of professional journalists, articles were written by the office-based editor/publisher. Some pieces were sent to them by members of the public, but were often unattributed, so may not have been first hand. Some may have been provided as examples of moral laxity, so emphasised certain elements at the expense of others. Accounts by French visitors seem to have been written by officers who were allowed limited freedom as prisoners of war. H. Rider Haggard was astounded by a request to be taken to Smithfield Market by a French visitor who hoped to witness such a spectacle. Many French visitors believed the practice was normal. This may have caused the English to mock the reports as propaganda, or to have inspired them to investigate the curious practice themselves.

Those who could afford to move to healthy suburbs abandoned the dark, dirty towns and cities from the eighteenth century, leaving their centres to fall into decay. By the mid-nineteenth century when sales and interest in them seems to have peaked, inner cities were no longer mixed communities where rich and poor worshipped under the same roof and the poor were supported by more affluent neighbours in times of need. High levels of poverty-driven crime further drove the physical separation of rich and poor. Claims were made that the better off had more knowledge of distant parts of empire and often campaigned for charities there, whilst ignoring problems at home. This lead Dickens to coin the term: ‘telescopic philanthropy’. Thus, when wife sales happened, the middle class were unlikely to be present; they did not relate to the people who participated, so the sales were mostly reported negatively.

In the early eighteenth century Sir Richard Steele complained of the indefensible practice of throwing cocks, and observed:

‘Some French writers have represented this diversion of the common people much to our disadvantage, and imputed it to a natural fierceness and cruelty of temper, as they do some other entertainments peculiar to our nation... I wish I knew how to answer this reproach. The ladies of the present day will probably be surprised to hear, that all, or the greater part of these barbarous recreations, were very much frequented by the fair sex, and countenanced by those amongst them of the highest rank and most finished education.’²

It seems the people of England were often a mystery to themselves as well as to tourists from across the Channel.

Some historians challenge the supposed age of many traditions: often, they were invented in the Tudor or Stuart periods following the suppression of the Church of Rome with its many allegedly idolatrous and ignorant practices. Assumptions were often made that traditional behaviour was fixed, whereas country people were constantly adapting to weather and a wide range of circumstances to survive. It makes sense that they were likewise flexible in their social behaviour. Authorities — often driven by religious beliefs or the need to control the terrifying eighteenth century creature, ‘the mob’— could encourage or condemn practices. Something as apparently simple as the arrival of a new priest — whether he was traditional or progressive — could have a major impact on local traditions. When a new ritual replaced an older one, the former was often soon forgotten and its new form gained the patina of tradition with surprising speed.

There are also problems in the various elements of the wife sale. While a few written accounts can be found in the mid-sixteenth century, it was not until well into the eighteenth century that accounts mentioned elements such as a public auction or the woman wearing a halter. So, does this imply continuity, adaptation, or a series of coincidences?

Rituals and practices generally arise in response to a need, and vanish when that need is gone. It seems that wife selling aimed to solve the problem of a broken marriage, which in turn required that the concept of a marriage for life existed, and that there was no other recourse when it failed.

For most of Britain’s history, people lived in small agricultural communities where they negotiated amongst themselves how to behave and solve disputes. Whilst the parish church was the centre of most communities, by the eighteenth century, many clerics were either absent or negligent, especially in isolated areas. People tended to marry people they grew up with. so knew them well; they were given advice and support from friends and families so they were likely to be compatible and able to live and work together. This may not have required a formal contract, but such unions were a force for good in communities, so were often celebrated, and a range of rituals grew around them.

Until modern times, a marriage could be the simple exchange of vows, even without a witness. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, marriage in Scotland required merely a declaration from the couple. Few people saw the need for any official involvement as many believed that ‘marriage was marriage, even when performed by a barber on the open moorland.’³

But in the eighteenth century, the economy expanded, and the population became more independent and mobile. Many young people had already left home for work and had little support or advice on their choice of partners, so marriages increasingly went wrong. But the absence of affordable divorce meant that they were trapped in their relationships till death took one of them. Men about to go to sea often married in haste to protect their girlfriend’s reputation and provide financial security for her if he failed to return. Guardians of young heiresses lived in fear of unscrupulous men seducing their charges to acquire their fortunes. Some couples married outside their own parishes to avoid the embarrassing and expensive rituals. But this could later cause problems if they needed proof of their marriage but were unable to track down witnesses, so they did not know if they were married or not. Further confusion followed the introduction of the 1704 Test Act which declared dissenters’ marriages to be void. ‘Fleet marriages’ were commonly made when sailors were leaving their sweethearts to go to sea. They were mistakenly believed to be legal by the young couples and were hoped to protect the young women if they later fell pregnant.

The 1757 Marriage Act was passed to establish a clear definition of legal marriage. It required a church service by an Anglican cleric, the details of which were entered into the parish register. Scotland continued with its traditional laws, hence the popularity of fast, discreet marriages by the English at Gretna Green, and the lesser-known border crossings at Coldstream, Berwick and Lamberton. Shaming continued in Welsh Nonconformist chapels into the nineteenth century. Apparently Bibles were thrown at women who misbehaved.

Before the Reformation, England’s church had courts for punishing breaches of moral behaviour. Its punishments mainly involved public shaming of the convicted, such as having to publicly admit to their crime and to stand in their underclothes in front of the congregation. In extreme cases, people could be denied the holy sacraments or excommunicated. When other religious groups were formed, they built their own places of worship, and developed their own systems. The Anglican authorities became weaker after 1660 as they became nervous of enforcing punishments for fear of people turning to the various Nonconformist groups.

The earliest known example of a wife sale involved a cleric being paraded round London for selling his wife.⁴ It dates from 1553, the year Queen Mary began the return of England ‘s church to Roman practices. The parson was from St Nicholas Cole Abbey, the first church to celebrate the revival of Catholicism. The timing suggests the so-called Parson Chicken had married in the Protestant church, but was returning to the practice of celibacy. His marriage was nullified, so his wife became surplus to requirements and was sold. He was pelted with refuse, but it is unclear whether this was for changing his faith, or abandoning his wife. Yet this is curious, as his marriage was nullified, so he was never legally married. How did he have the right to sell the woman? It seems the driving force in many cases was the need to have a man responsible for the woman to keep her out of the Poor House.

In 1581 the Vicar of Gamlingay convinced Edmund Scayles to sell his wife Isabell to Christopher Upchurch for sixteen shillings, but a churchwarden reported him to the consistory court in Ely.⁵ This was after Queen Mary’s death, so the country was once more Protestant under Queen Elizabeth. This incident is incomprehensible, but it again shows clerical involvement. The high price means the matter was serious, but why the sale was forced is a mystery. As in the majority of cases, there is no information on the wife. Was Scayles living with two women and forced to sell one of them? As with Parson Chicken, if there were two wives, one marriage was illegal, so how did the man have any rights over the other woman? More sales were referred to consistory courts in the years 1584, 1585, 1613, 1638 and 1696,⁶ which covers the reigns of the Tudors through to William of Orange, but not surprisingly, there were no courts held during the Civil War when people seemed to have managed their own affairs locally.

The Church of Rome was a huge transnational organisation, so many church leaders in England had close ties with the continent. Thomas More wrote fluently in Latin and his writings were widely read abroad. But when Henry VIII declared his independence from Rome, he also deprived English scholars of access to the written word, much of which was in Latin. This language was used to impart mystery and ensure priests controlled the laity’s access to the very Word of God. Many books and manuscripts were lost in the iconoclasm, which put the brakes on education and early science. But it also meant England was no longer subservient to Europe, or specifically to the southern countries which retained their links with the Vatican. Severing England’s ties with Rome made her more isolated, but the English became more independent, as they debated how to read the Bible free of priestly interpretation and intervention. Such independence of thought, of thinking on the fly, was evident in several cases of wife selling, with witnesses debating the correct procedures, aware of the need for the sale to be seen as legal and supported by neighbours should problems later arise. It would be interesting to discover if such independent thinking was found in other Protestant countries.

Europe’s Reformation was very different to that of England. Their objections to the Church of Rome were triggered by Luther’s outrage at the corruption of the church and the huge sums raised by selling indulgences to shorten a person’s time in purgatory. But in England, the church was still popular. The population was mostly rural, far removed from international politics. They paid for the decoration and maintenance of their churches and shrines, they participated in festivals and enactments of Bible stories, and left legacies for prayers in their memory which helped pay for church schools. When churches were ordered to be vandalised, especially under Edward VI, some images were rescued or painted over, and objects for masses were hidden, to reappear under Mary.

A major downside of the separation from Rome was that England became the only European country that did not reform its divorce laws. England alone continued to make it impossible to divorce. In the wake of Henry VIII’s marital problems, there had been hopes for change, but his son was a conservative, so this failed to happen. Mary tightened the rules, and Elizabeth had no interest in the matter. As a result, marriage was often embarked upon as a source of happiness and mutual support but became an inescapable trap when problems arose.

If a marriage failed, the church could grant a separation ‘from bed and board’, but this did not allow either party to remarry. Marriage continued to be defined as lasting till the death of one of them. In 1603, it became a criminal offence to marry while a spouse still lived.⁷ It seems that, by then, people were already making their own arrangements. The high cost of divorce, of having to argue through three courts before obtaining an Act of Parliament made it almost impossible. The 1857 act transferred marital affairs from the ecclesiastical courts to the state and removed the need for an act of parliament. The New Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes which was begun in 1858 managed all aspects of divorce. Before this, virtually the only divorces granted were to wealthy men whose marriages had failed to produce a viable male heir. Only fifteen divorces were granted by this date.⁸

It seems likely that before the Tudors, marital arrangements were mostly negotiated amongst communities; it is possible that the notion of the union was less rigid, so when relationships failed, local solutions were found. Or perhaps the belief in a better world after death made life on earth bearable.

2

Sources

If only one could unmarry again if it didn’t suit! Only one couldn’t

Edward Lear¹

The practice of wife selling was surprisingly widespread, both in place and time, and covers people from the very poorest ranks of society to the upper classes, so it is surprising to find so few mentions of it in modern print. Its origins are unclear, but traces can be found in church records from the late seventeenth century, with the most recent being 1920. Witnesses to sales were recorded for local history societies well into the twentieth century.

The only book to date that has been dedicated to it is Wives for Sale by Samuel Pyeatt Menefee,² whose ‘scholarly examination of an informal institution’ was published in 1981 but is now out of print. This is extremely well researched, ranging over newspaper sources, court records and folklore, but it is flawed by the author — an American legal historian — focusing on numbers and failing to question the veracity of some of the cases. He also had little knowledge of England and its people, so he often fails to understand the variety and complexities of their behaviour.

E.P. Thompson’s Customs in Common³ does an impressive job in placing wife selling within a cultural and social context, discussing English crowds, local justice, and the wider field of marital relations, as they were seen at the time, and in the decades since. He also writes well on the problems encountered in researching and analysing the subject, and attempts to understand why it has been largely ignored by writers.

Prolific author/historian/cleric Sabine Baring-Gould relates a tale in his Devonshire Characters and Strange Events⁴ from when he was a young boy, and the local poet returned from market with his bought wife. He has left us a valuable first-hand account of a sale, the community’s response and — perhaps best of all — the outcome. He devoted a whole chapter to wife selling, which includes a number of other incidents, from various sources, providing an indication of how widespread the practice was in rural Devon, and how it was perceived there.

He also provides a challenge to the French perception of English wife selling:

‘It is, so far as my experience goes, quite useless to assure a Frenchman that such a transfer of wives is not a matter of everyday occurrence, and is not legal: he replies with an expression of incredulity, that of course English people endeavour to make light of, or deny, a fact that is notorious... I heard a country curé once preach on marriage, and contrast its indissolubility in Catholic France with the laxity in Protestant England where any one, when tired of his wife, puts a halter round her neck, takes her to the next market town and sells her for what she will fetch. I ventured to call on this curé, and remonstrate, but he answered me he had seen the facts stated in books of the highest authority, and that my disputing the statement did not prove that his authorities were wrong but that my experience was limited.’⁵

It is unclear how the French could be so much better informed on the matter than the English, but they show the same stubbornness as the wife sellers did in insisting the practice was legal and morally sound. It seems the folklore of English wife selling had created a French folklore of it being widespread and socially acceptable.

A French officer, General R. Pillet spent a decade travelling in England, most of it as a prisoner of war at the time of Napoleon when wife selling seems to have been flourishing. He wrote a book of his observations which included a chapter called Divorces among the Common People⁶ which may have served as a primary source of French information or — as the English authorities would call it — misinformation.

Centuries of religious and political rivalry may well have been a major factor in the widespread fame of wife selling in France, and the apparent hypocrisy that a country famed for its enlightenment should be reducing its own women to the status of chattels. Similar criticism — or perhaps bemusement — was shown by North Americans who were unimpressed by the English objecting to the selling of African slaves whilst allowing the sale of Anglo Saxon women, so the abolition movement acquired an air of both arrogance and hypocrisy.

Scouring the indexes of English history books unearthed a rare mention in Christopher Hibbert’s large tome The English A Social History,⁷ where he claimed, like Menefee and many newspapers, that it was an ancient custom. He provides no examples, but cites the sale at Weydon Priors Fair in Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge set in the 1840s which caused such scandal when published in 1886. Recent research has unearthed Hardy’s private notebook which reveals the famous account of the sale of Henchard’s wife was based on a real incident. Hardy began the notebook in 1883 and it includes items from the Dorset County Chronicle. An account from 1829 of a sale in Stamford, Lincolnshire, was noted by Hardy as being ‘used in the Mayor of Casterbridge’.⁸

Most accounts used in this book are from the British Library’s online newspaper archive, but early papers were frequently printed in whole or part in italic, so examples often fail to be picked up by the search engine. There is also a problem in the dearth of first-hand accounts: the author only found three detailed descriptions of the sales, one of which involved interviewing those present, so it seems they were not deemed worthy of record either by the press or by private journals or letter writers. Perhaps they took place covertly so left no trace.

It could be that there are accounts to be found in unexpected places, as E.P. Thompson refers to the pioneering work of Jeanette Neeson with reference to food rioting. Opposition was expressed in many forms other than riots which were recorded in contemporary court records, and ranged from lobbying to harassment and arson, some of which could continue long after the events.⁹ In some accounts of wife sales, the initial event was unrecorded, but details emerged in later court cases over inheritance and even in baptism registers. Some accounts may have had more value in the material they were written on, as happened to Boswell’s diary after his death. Some of his papers were found used to wrap goods in a market in Boulogne.¹⁰ Some of Bach’s works were used to wrap butter.

Because wife selling was not a crime in itself, events fail to appear in court records as punishable incidents. But they formed the background to some cases of assault against the wife, in public disturbances, riot due to the crowds they attracted, or in parish records in relation to the support of a wife and children.

Neeson also suggested that local law enforcement may have left no traces, as she described how riots over enclosures sometimes involved calling out troops. But this was often time-consuming, and was usually a last resort. She described a group of local gents gathering for a meal who were notified of a riot. They rode to the site, settled the dispute and returned to their port, so no official record was made. Another record of a riot was found in War Office records, so accounts can appear in surprising places.¹¹

It is hard to imagine any wife sales requiring a mounted response. But they were sometimes held at the time of the local assizes or quarter sessions, which increased the risk of legal intervention. Sales often only lasted a few minutes, which further lowers the chances of any record having been made.

The eighteenth century was a prolific time for the writing of letters and journals, but many were destroyed or lost; some authors requested their destruction at their death. If published,