Customs in Common, page 54
Passing sentence on all three the “very learned” Chairman of the Bench allowed himself to indulge in a little dry wit (“the lady certainly did not rate her own value very highly, for a pot of beer and a shilling was the only consideration given for that valuable commodity”) before passing on to higher levels of invigilatory moral exhortation. The practice of wife sales was “highly immoral and illegal” and “had a tendency to bring the holy estate of matrimony into contempt”. But “the crime” would have been greater if it had been committed in open market. Taking also into consideration the fact that the offence was committed “in a state of ignorance”, he thought a sentence of one month’s imprisonment for each of them was sufficient. It is not recorded whether the accommodation at the local gaol was more, or less, salubrious than that at the local workhouse. The convicted felons had almost nothing to offer in their defence. Mrs Skinner said, “My husband did not go on to my wishes, and that was the reason I wished to part” [a laugh].1
Morning Chronicle, 25 July 1828.
IV
It is now clear — although it was not so in the 1960s when I commenced to collect this evidence — that we must remove the wife sale from the category of brutal chattel purchase and place it within that of divorce and re-marriage. This still may arouse inappropriate expectations, since what is involved is the exchange of a woman between two men in a ritual which humiliates the woman as a beast. Yet the symbolism cannot be read only in that way, for the importance of the publicity of the public market-place and of “delivery” in a halter lay also in the evidence thus provided that all three parties concurred in the exchange. The consent of the wife is a necessary condition for the sale. This is not to say that her consent may not have been extracted under duress — after all, a husband who wanted (or threatened) to sell a wife was not much of a consort. A wife who was sold in Redruth (1820) and who was brought, with her purchaser, before the Quarter Sessions in Truro, “stated her husband had ill-treated her so frequently and expressed his determination of selling her, that she was induced to submit to the exposure to get rid of him”. This must have been true of some cases. But not, perhaps, the whole truth in this Redruth case, for the wife went on to admit “that she had lived with. . . her purchaser before she was publicly sold to him”.1 In many sales, even where there was a semblance of an open auction and public bidding, the purchaser was pre-arranged and was already the wife’s lover.
West Briton, 14 Apr. 1820.
To recover the “truth” about any marital history is not easy: to attempt to recover it, from newspaper snippets, after 150 years have passed is to go on a fool’s errand. Even where direct assertions are made as to the wife’s “misconduct” prior to the sale, all that we are given is the evidence of gossip or scandal. Yet this evidence does not tell us exactly nothing — let us take three cases, all from the year 1837.
The first concerns a sale in the butter market at Bradford (West Yorkshire). The report notes: “The alleged ground of the separation was the incontinence of the wife, whose affections were stated to have been alienated by an old delver, who had occasionally got his dinner at their house.” When the husband commenced the auction “the first and only bona fide bid” was a sovereign from the delver. This “was immediately accepted, and, the money being paid, the couple walked off amidst the execrations of the crowd”.1
Halifax Express, cited in The Times, 9 Feb. 1837.
The second took place in Walsall market. Here a man led in his wife by a halter from a village eight or nine miles away, and sold her in a few minutes for 2s. 6d. The purchaser was a nailer, who had come in from the same village. All parties were reported to be satisfied. The wife had in fact been living with the purchaser for the previous three years.2
Wolverhampton Chronicle, cited in Globe, 27 Oct. 1837.
The third case took place in Wirksworth, Derbyshire. The wife of John Allen had eloped with James Taylor the previous summer. The “injured husband”, learning that the couple were at Whaley Bridge, went and found them together in lodgings. “He demanded £3 for her clothes, which Taylor said he would pay on condition that he would accompany them to Wirksworth on the market day, and deliver her, as he called it, according to the law.” Here we have a clear case of “delivery”: Allen passed over the end of the halter to Taylor, and made a formal statement.
‘I, John Allen, was bereaved of my wife by James Taylor, of Shottle, on the 11th of July last. I have brought her here to sell her for 3s 6d. Will you buy her, James?’ James answered: ‘I will, here is the money, and you are witness, Thomas Riley’ — calling to a potman who was appointed for the purpose.
The ring was delivered to Allen with three sovereigns and 3s 6d, when he shook hands with his wife and her paramour, wishing them all the good luck in the world.3
Derbyshire Courier, cited in The Times, 22 Aug. 1837.
It could be argued that the first example offers no more than gossip; but the second and third cannot be passed over so easily. A purchaser does not happen to arrive from the same village, eight miles away, at the moment of sale: this was pre-arranged. Nor is a reporter likely to have invented the story of prior elopement and co-habitation. Indeed, the frequency of cases in which the wife was sold to a man with whom she was living already — and had been so living in some cases for three, four or five years4 — raises a quite different question: why, if elopement and desertion was possible, on occasion, on the wife’s part as well as on the husband’s, did the parties still feel it necessary to undergo the public (and shaming) ritual of a sale?
See e.g. Derby Mercury, 3 Jan. 1844; Nottingham case in The Times, 23 Sept. 1834; Menefee, p. 279 note 32; London City Mission Magazine, Aug. 1861, p. 189.
I will come back to this searching question, although the answer may in the end be found only in the inaccessible personal history of each case. The difficulty with this material is not only that the evidence is so unsatisfactory but also that one can not conclusively show any one case to be “representative”. Today’s obligatory methodological imperative is to quantify, but the complexities of personal relationships are especially resistant to this exercise. And the “typical” short newspaper report gives no information at all on the motives of the parties — it is no more than a bleak report of a sale.
However, I have attempted to press the evidence into rude classifications, with this result:
Since “no information” means no information on the point whatsoever, this shows 91 cases which signify the wife’s assent or active participation as against 4 non-consents. If we look at sales between 1831 and 1850 (at which time the news reports tend to be fullest), we find:
I regard these quantities as literary and impressionistic evidence, as contrasted with the “hard” evidence in this chapter, which is the close interrogation of texts and contexts. The classifications are not finely-aimed. Let us examine each in its turn.
Wife not consenting. Moralistic notices at the time, as well as much subsequent historical commentary, imply that the wife was a passive chattel or unwilling party to the transaction. In fact, three of the four cases in the first table did not result in sales. In each of these cases we are told that a bargain was made privately between the husband and a purchaser, but was subsequently disowned by the wife.
The exception rests upon a letter addressed by Ann Parsons to a Somerset magistrate, 9 January 1768:
I am the daughter of Ann Collier that lived at the bottom of Rush Hill and in the Early part of Life to my Great Mortification I was Married to a Man who had no Regard for himself or for the Support of Me and My Children. At the Commencement of the last Warr he Entered into the Kings service and Sir I Can’t relate to you the tenth part of the abuses that I received from Him before his admission and Since his Return from the Army, at last for the Support of his Extravagancy He made Sale of me and Sold me for Six pound and Six Shillings and I was not in the least acquainted until he told me what he had done. At the same time He requested of me to keep the younges child. . .
In support of this account she enclosed a bill of sale drawn between her husband, John Parsons of Midsomer Norton, clothworker, and John Tooker of the same parish, gentleman: this asigned and set over Ann Parsons “with all right Property Claim Services and demand whatsoever” to John Tooker.
This is clear enough. But Ann Parsons went on to complain — not that the sale had taken place — but that her husband had not honoured the treaty. Three months after the sale (which took place on 24 October 1766) her husband “Visited me and Demanded Mor Money and abused me and the Man that he sold me too violently forcing open the door Swearing he would be Death to us both”, and continuing this harassment until she applied for protection to a magistrate, who committed John Parsons to the Bridewell in Shepton Mallet. Committal had taken place the previous Michaelmas, and Ann Parsons was now afraid of the vengeance he might take when set at liberty. Her reason for petitioning the magistrate was to ensure her husband’s continued detention. It is not easy to know what to make of this story. Ann Parsons may (as she testified) have been sold without her knowledge and consent; or she may have thought this to be the best story to tell to the JP from whom she was seeking protection. Once sold — and (note) to a man of higher social status — it is certain that she wished the contract to be honoured, and she was pursuing her ex-marital revenge with skill and success.1
Brit. Lib. Add MSS 32, 084 ff. pp. 14-15. My thanks to Douglas Hay for the transcription.
In the other cases of non-consent there is less to go on. In one case (North Bovey, Devon, circa 1866) it is said that the husband made a private agreement with a purchaser to sell his wife for a quart of beer. She repudiated the agreement, took her two children to Exeter, and returned to North Bovey only for her husband’s funeral.2 Another case came to light in a trial for bigamy in Birmingham in 1823. John Homer, an ex-soldier, was alleged to have treated his wife brutally and to have finally sold her against her will in a halter in the market. But the purchaser was her own brother, who for three shillings was “buying her out” of the marriage or “redeeming” her. (One does not know whether this case should be classified as non-consent or as an arranged divorce.) Homer then supposed that he was free to marry again and made the error of going through a formal church ceremony. He was convicted of bigamy and sentenced to seven years transportation.3 In the other case, at Swindon Fair in 1775, it was said that an “eminent shoemaker” of Wootton Bassett came to a formal agreement with a cattle dealer to sell his wife to him for £50, and to “deliver her upon demand the next morning” —
Devon N & Q, iv (1906-7), p. 54.
Birmingham Chronicle, 7 Aug. 1823.
Agreeable to this bargain the purchaser set out in a post-chaise accompanied by many of his friends, decked in white cockades, in order to demand his purchase, when to their disappointment neither Crispin nor Crispiana. . . were to be met with.4
Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 23 Dec. 1775.
These cases do not contradict the rule, which was noted by some contemporaries, that the wife’s consent was essential. This is confirmed by occasions when the wife repudiated with vigour an attempted sale. A visitor to Smithfield market in 1817 saw a man struggling to place a halter around the neck of a young woman of remarkable beauty. In the midst of a large and growing crowd, the wife resisted the attempt with all her strength. Crowd and constables intervened and the couple were taken before a magistrate. The husband explained that his wife had been unfaithful and he was therefore asserting a right to sell her.1 In the wife’s resistance to the halter we have confirmation that both halter and her consent were essential to confer legitimacy on the transaction. Even where the purchaser was not pre-arranged and where there was a genuine auction with open bidding, the wife was able to exercise a veto. Thus a report from Manchester (1824) says that “after several biddings she was knocked down for 5s; but not liking the purchaser, she was put up again for 3s and a quart of ale”.2 In a more dubious Bristol case (1823) the wife was “quite satisfied” with her purchaser, who, however, then re-sold her to another; “the lady. . . not liking the transfer, made off with her mother” and refused to be claimed by the second purchaser unless. “by order of a magistrate, who dismissed the case”.3
L’Hermite de Londres, ou Observations sur les Moeurs et Usages des Anglais au Commencement du XIX Siècle (Paris, 1821), ii, pp. 318 ff.
The Times, 29 June 1824.
See Menefee, p. 68.
There must have been cases of forcible wife sale, in which the wife was terrified into consent or was too simple-minded or friendless to resist.4 And there must have been other affairs in taverns which were drunken muddles. William Hutton, in a poem, “The Pleasures of Matrimony”, reconstructed one of these which might have been a model for the sale in The Mayor of Casterbridge. The wife called into the ale-house to get her husband to come home to help with “the infant flock”; the husband was beside himself with anger (even though “he spent the money which she earn’d”) and sold her to a fellow-drinker — William Martin, a young stockinger — for a pint of ale:
Menefee, pp. 115 and 117 suggests examples, but those I have consulted are inconclusive. In a Grassington case, 1807, the wife “refused to be delivered”: Annual Register, 1807, p. 378. In the case of a woman supposedly sold in the Grass Market, Edinburgh (1828), a broadside gives a lurid account of seven hundred women stoning and attacking the husband “in consequence of the insult the fair sex had received”: W. Boag, printer, Newcastle, Bibliotheca Lindesiana (1898), no. 1656. However an identical story, with the same seven hundred women, is found in a broadside in the Madden Collection (no. 1872), but is there attributed not to Edinburgh but to Liverpool. See also Menefee, Case 215, p. 239.
The pint was order’d, bargain struck,
And nothing back return’d for luck.
The parties of a halter thought,
But this they found would cost a groat.
The halter scheme was instant lost,
As being twice what Hannah cost,
For that same reason neither would
Pay fourpence that she might be toll’d.
But a deed of sale was drawn and signed between the two men, with the two children of the marriage divided — the child on its feet to the father, the babe-in-arms to the mother. Throughout all this the wife is described as a non-consenting party. But she does go off with the young stockinger, tramps with him from Hinckley to Loughborough: they fall in love with each other, live happily for a year, and are devastated when the husband repents and sends the Hinckley overseers to bring her back —
She follow’d, but in anguish cried,
O that the knot could be untied!1
William Hutton, Poems: chiefly Tales (1804). Menefee, pp. 194-5 is quoting Hutton by way of a cutting of an article by G. T. Lawley (possibly “In the Good Old Days”, County Advertiser for Staffordshire and Worcestershire, 7 Aug. 1921): both get the poem a bit wrong and delete Hannah’s opposition to the sale (which she subsequently accepts).
The poem is not evidence, but it is not altogether fiction either, since it was based on the poet’s own experiences as a stockinger’s apprentice in the 1740s, and the purchaser, William Martin, was his own friend. Yet the poem had been written (or re-written) in 1793, and was no doubt reinvented from distant recollections.2 I am suggesting, not that wives were not sometimes sold under duress, but that if they distinctly repudiated the transaction then the sale was not held to be good according to customary lore and sanction. The alternative view, of the wife sale as a chattel purchase against the wife’s will, presents very serious difficulties. For that would have offended against law on a number of counts, and very probably an action could lie for rape. Some wives might be too ignorant to take recourse to law and have no kin to come to their defence. But even in the eighteenth-century village people knew how to make their way to the magistrate’s, parson’s or parish officer’s door; and it is beyond all probability that no such case should ever have occurred. If any such case had ever come before the courts, then the courts — at any time after 1815 — would have administered exemplary punishment and with the maximum of publicity, for polite opinion had come to abhor the practice, and JPs and constables often sought to intervene and prevent it. But no record of any action of that kind, on the wife’s application, or on the part of her kin or friends, has come to light.
Hutton’s Poems were in part reconstituted from manuscripts of thirty or more years earlier, burned with his premises in the Birmingham Riots of 1791. For William Martin, see Llewellyn Jewitt, The Life of William Hutton (1872), pp. 144-6; Catherine Hutton, The Life of William Hutton (1817), p. 128.
Wife Consenting. This is the least satisfactory category. The evidence is derived from some explicit reference to consent in the source, or else to some such phrase as the wife departed with her purchaser “in high glee”, seemed “very happy”, “much pleased”, or “eager”. A few other cases are included in which the indications of consent are so strong that they allow of no other inference: as, for example, where the first marriage was in common law only and where the sale was followed immediately by a second marriage in church or registry, or cases where the husband immediately regretted the sale, tried to get his wife to return to him, but she refused.
No Information. In these cases the sources afford no information as to the wife’s consent. But the reading has been strict. In a number of cases it could be possible to infer her assent from circumstantial evidence: thus, when all three parties come to a market-town from a village several miles distant; where the wife is a signatory to a paper sale; where the wife is sold to a lodger or neighbour; cases where the husband sells (or gives) his stock or implements of trade with his wife (thus implying that he is leaving the new couple in possession of his livelihood); cases where the husband evinces acute jealousy, or where he evinces a show of unusual generosity to the new couple; or a handful of cases recorded by local historians who go on to add that the second marriage was happy and long-lasting. I am satisfied in my own mind that in many of these cases the wife was an active party to the exchange, but, since the evidence is slender, I have resisted the temptation to remove them from this group.
