On this day in 1818 – man offers to sell wife

On May 5, 1818, a man attended at Macclesfield market with his wife wearing a halter around her neck; he was offering her for sale!

A deal was struck, and he sold his wife for between three and four shillings.

The Mayor of Macclesfield ordered that all parties be arrested, and the three of them were remanded to Middlewich House of Correction until the next Quarter Session.

This was the first offence of this kind to be brought to the notice of the police.

Wife selling in England was a way of ending an unsatisfactory marriage that probably began in the late 17th century, when divorce was a practical impossibility for all but the very wealthiest. After parading his wife with a halter around her neck, arm, or waist, a husband would publicly auction her to the highest bidder. 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.

Wife selling persisted in England in some form until the early 20th century; according to the jurist and historian James Bryce, writing in 1901, wife sales were still occasionally taking place during his time. In one of the last reported instances of a wife sale in England, a woman giving evidence in a Leeds police court in 1913 claimed that she had been sold to one of her husband’s workmates for £1. Wikipedia