From time to time I’ll spot an item on the Wikipedia website that intrigues me, and that was the case when I logged on today.
I had thought I had seen just about everything, but I was wrong.
The “featured topic” today was a detailed description of the archaic English practice of “Wife Selling”.
My initial expectation was that it would turn out to be a write-up about wife buying (as being a male in modern society, it has been my experience that the man pretty much ends up paying for everything right from day one of the dating process and ending at late as at his own death if his wife gets a good enough divorce attorney).
That is, I expected to read about dowries and stuff like that. But no … this really was about wife selling!
That bears repeating: at certain times in English history, it was not unheard of to sell your wife if you and she were no longer clicking well together … for money!
Granted, we’re not talking about a lot of money here. The write-up indicates a modest range of typical sales proceeds:
“Prices paid for wives varied considerably, from a high of £100 plus £25 each for her two children in a sale of 1865 (equivalent to about £10,800 as of 2010) to a low of a glass of ale, or even free. The lowest amount of money exchanged was three farthings (three-quarters of one penny), but the usual price seems to have been between 2s 6d and 5 shillings.”
To convert that to American money, that maximum of £10,800 (the equivalent proceeds at today’s inflated price levels) would equate to roughly $16,000. Compare that to what it cost you to buy your freedom if you’ve been to divorce court.
When women today insist that “It’s a man’s world”, perhaps they’re referring to 17th England?
Is it moral to be able to “buy” or “sell” another person? Not really (although that’s what our employers do with us, an hour or a month at a time).
“… It was a ritual …”
However, that wasn’t really what was going on for the most part here. The whole thing was more theater than it was substance: it gave couples who had tired of each other a symbolic way of publicly ending their unsatisfactory marriage. It was a ritual.
Something analogous occurs in modern-day contract law, whereby contracts are not legally binding without “consideration” (the price one obligates oneself to pay in return for the other party’s promise to do something). So it’s not uncommon for “consideration” to be a very small sum of money (even as little as $1), just to satisfy the requirement.
There was no provision in English law back then permitting such sales, and so it therefore follows that any “sale” would take place only if the wife was amenable to the deal on offer. If she had somebody better in the “on-deck circle” and was eager to see the back of her now-boring hubby, it would be a simple matter to have her new guy bid a token amount at the “sale”.
It seems that bidding was not spirited (what guy would bid money on a woman who had not already let him know that she wanted to be with him?), so there would be no real risk of another guy outbidding the intended “winner”.
The only real problem that I can see is the situation where the wife no longer wanted to be married at all (to any guy). In such a scenario, the ritual of “wife selling” wouldn’t get the job done.
However, that scenario also arises in modern times in certain Catholic countries that do not allow divorces. What does a dissatisfied wife (or husband) do in that sort of legal environment?
Either she continues to live under the same roof but leads a separate life, or she moves out (and perhaps moves in with someone more to her liking). Or perhaps she makes hubby’s life a living hell so that he moves out and she gets to stay.
Would I like to see “wife selling” legalized in America? Nope … it seems like slavery (one person owning another). But I would like to see the modern practice of taking hubby to the cleaners in divorce court ended.
That also seems to be a lot like slavery … or at least it’s like indentured servitude. There’s no moral reason why a hubby should be forced to buy his freedom, any more than there is any moral reason why a hubby should be permitted to sell his soon-to-be ex-wife’s freedom.
Stay tuned,
-Mack Doppler
