WIVES FOR SALE

Greymouth Evening Star, 20 May 1938, Page 10

WIVES FOR SALE

OLD BRITISH CUSTOM Recently in Yugoslavia a young peasant agreed to purchase a wile tor £25. He paid the money and then her guardian refused to allow the marriage. Hr. sold the girl for £;>(J, ami pocketed the peasant's £25. The disappointed suitor sued the guardian, and. when he appeared in Court, shot and seriously wounded him. Such shooting incidents nitty he rare in Great Britain, but. although the fact is not widely known, the buying and selling of wives—and for far less than £25 —went on less than a century ago. Helix Farley's "Bristol Journal.'’ dated January 10. 1824. reports “Saturday a man named Fcako sold his wife in Chipping Ongar market. Essex, for It)/-. The 101 l collector demanded and received the toll of Id paid for every head of livestock sold in that market."

“The Times" of December 31. 1823. mentioned the custom. Professor Harold Tmnperley quotes Marcellus, the French Charge d’Affaires in London, as informing his official chief. Chateaubriand, on July 4. 1x23. that the current price for wives at Smithfield had risen from tin or twelve shillings to twenty or twenty-two shillings. and that recently a woman had been sold for £5(l.

Many queer tales were in cirimkitioti about that, time, not the least curious being the one about Warren Hastings. A man in tin- parish of Adlestrop. Gloucestershire, tried to sell his wife. lie took h«c to the neigltbouring market town with a rope round her neck, and remarked that “the Governor had bought his wife.” “The Governor” was, Warren Hastin&s. wlio hud been dead for some years, and was a. local hero in the border country of Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, the romance of bis story being enhanced by his legendary purchase of Baroness Imhoff from her husband.

A year or two ago Ibero was still living at Brandon, in Suffolk, an old man named Talbot, who saw an itiniCraiif. tinker lead his wife lO' Market Hill and sell her to another travelling tradesman for lialf-a-crown, The purchaser look her away in his cart fort It wit h.

An old lady of Repton who died a few years ago. spoke frequently of an incident she witnessed in 1552. when she was nine. A man led his wife from Rurton-on-Trent, five miles away, and pul her up io auction after parading her three times round the cross. She was bought, for half-a-crown and a half a gallon of beer. There, is a. far more reci-ni case on record. Less than fifty years ago a bargee on the Grand Canal sold his wife, to another bargee for the reasonable sum of fourpence. Shortly afterwards the -woman returned to her earlier partner, and the wronged purchaser then applied to the local Magistrate for redress. The appeal was dismissed'with a remark on the shocking depravity of the canal population Two or three years before the war. Mr. Alfred Chambers was acting as a poor man’s lawyer in Liverpool. There came to him two seamen, natives of Lancashire, and with true northern directness they came straight Io the point.

Said one .man, "This.‘ore’s my missus, that’s ’is. We-.wanf. to swop.. We thought you might, draw up a. paper to make it legal-like.” Mr. Chambers says that his preliminary surprise followed by his clients’ emphatic disgust at the limitations of the law were things he would never forget. The “York Chronicle.” of July, 1834, contained the following account of a sale in the north: — “On Wednesday morning the village of Ilome-upon-Spalding Moor was in the greatest confusion owing to a report that John Lazenby, la-

botf'er, intended to exhibit t'ne trail parim r of his affection for sale. About eleven o'clock, a vast number of people as.-mrnltled to see.' the transaction, and a more disgraceful scene was never witnessed. The husband slated that his wife had partly left her childmi mid her home, mid had joined herself to a person of the name oi Britton Htty. The first bid was 1.- by a huckster, who was passing with his carl at. the time. Hie. next 2- by her old admirer Htty, when the poor disconsolate husband declared it to be quite enough for her. unless she mended her manners.'

“A DISGRACEFUL SCENE.'’ Two years later the "Observer" reported. “On Wednesday morning one of those disgraceful scenes. the sale of a wife, took place at the New Islington cat th l market. A young man. seeing her tied up for sale, bid 5/- for her. Be was outbid by several .persons. but subsequently became the purchasm’ of the lot Im' 2li/-. ami conveyed her home in a coach to his lodgings. Th*' other man walked home whistling merrily, declaring lie had got rid of a Iroubiisome. noisv woman and it was 11m happiest day of his life."

Incredibie a- it may sound, people frequently regarded .-itch transactions as quite legal. In some parts of the country it was looked npmi as a rough form of divorce.

Tim practice of buying and selling wives, which forms tile prelate to Thomas Hardy’;-; “Mayor of (’asterbridge." long lingered in Macclesfield. In 17711 mt “hotic.si farmer'’ bought two wives, at once, intending to do a good day's business when in town. One cost, him a shilling ami the other half-a-'Town. He led I hem home to the wife he already had, with halters round 1 lieir necks.

Utility himself wrme a letter with reference lo the “Mayor oi ('asterbridge." saying that the stile of wives was common in the. 182(t's —“These sales had various feature's of detail but how mucli cither sale resembled that of tile story In its details T am unable to say. J fancy a sailor was the purchaser in mm of ilif it'ue instatiecs, but I am not sure."

(kwasioitally the law vi<n<d the practice with penalties, for at the West Yorkshire Sessions of June 28. 1837. a man named Joshua Jackson, convicted of selling his wife, was im prisoned for a month with hard labour. bid less serious offences were punished far more severely. The Archdeacon of Craven, in the same county, was talking io an old man in his parish. Guisely, on the subject. The old fellow moved about rather uneasily, but at last came out with: —

"Well nail then, a grandmother o’ mine wur sold that road, she wur that. ’Ave ’eered my feyther tell abaht it many a time. They put an ’alter rahnd ’or neck, tba knaws. 'appen to 1 niaake it legal like. Aye (reflectively) and wurst o' it wur. as my father sometimes said, ‘at we lost two cottages along o’ it. wc did an’ all.” This sale probably took place in the early I.Blo’s.