Sep 29, 2018 3 min read

Throughout history there are many examples of women being unfairly treated by both law and custom, including (sometime) this week in 1847, when George Wray, an English commoner, sold his wife in a public auction to the highest bidder, William Harwood, for a shilling. Actually, Harwood was the only bidder, he being Wray’s wife’s lover, and the happy couple strolled off together, while the satisfied Wray pocketed his shilling and moved on.

Sounds crazy, and it wasn’t legal, but it did happen in both England and America, because divorces were prohibitively expensive for poor commoners. Of course, couples could always separate, but if the wife then took up with another man, the husband could legally demand payment from his wife’s lover for having sexual relations with her. Thus, selling the wife to the lover was a mostly satisfactory compromise.

Occasionally, though, there were bidding wars. The husband would announce the auction – often without informing his wife – drag her to the public square, put a ribbon around her neck, and announce to the crowd her virtues, which he usually exaggerated because her negatives almost certainly outnumbered her positives, or he wouldn’t be getting rid of her. Often, chief among those negatives was the wife’s serial unfaithfulness. The wife would then go to the highest bidder, usually a total stranger.

There were times, however, when a husband was so embittered by his wife’s unfaithfulness that during the auction he would enumerate her bad qualities as well as her good. One such husband, Joseph Thompson, called his wife “a born serpent” and warned bidders to avoid her as they would avoid “a mad dog, a roaring lion, a loaded pistol, cholera.” He then listed her assets, which included milking cows and being a good drinking companion. “I therefore offer here with all her perfections and imperfections, for the sum of fifty shillings,” he concluded. What actual price (if any) he received for her is not known.

But there was one positive for the women involved. By law, when men and women married in the 1800s, all the wife’s material possessions became the husband’s, but one prerequisite to every auction was that the husband had to relinquish all possessions the wife brought to their marriage, which the new husband would possess. So that was an added incentive with respect to the wife gaining a new husband and, back then, protector and breadwinner. And, surprisingly, most second marriages worked out.

Of course, it being illegal, the government began cracking down on this practice, and when it became cheaper to divorce in the 1860s, the practice ended, thereby leaving us with few alternatives to divorce, which is usually bitter and, these days, once again expensive.

Bruce G. Kauffmann’s email address is bruce@historylessons.net.