RootsChat.Com
General => The Common Room => The Lighter Side => Topic started by: Trishanne on Wednesday 12 April 17 15:28 BST (UK)
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I found this in some Lancaster records from 1804.
Looking at a comparison site 4s 9d in 1792 is now worth £26.13. I reckon he got a real bargain.
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He certainly did get a bargain but she must have been desperate poor woman. I wonder who sold her though?
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"I wonder who sold her though?"
I expect it was her husband! Have you read the Mayor Of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy?
Giggsy
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See http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=459319.msg3207110#msg3207110 about wife sales.
Regarding "Selling Wives" apparently there were cases in Leeds in 1926 and Blackwood (Mon) in 1928.
"English Folklore" by A.R. Wright
Stan
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I am wondering if he bought her at a hiring fair as a servant. They were together for 12 years before they got married.
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Wife sales were often conducted on market days and the sale recorded in the auctioneer's accounts, occasionally parish officers acted as auctioneers.
Stan
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Thank goodness we've moved on from there! Perhaps that sort of thing was where the tradition of the bride's father "giving her away" to her new husband came from?
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... Perhaps that sort of thing was where the tradition of the bride's father "giving her away" to her new husband came from?
I don't think so. The marriage 'give-away' is just handing over responsibility for maintenance to another (usually younger) man.
Many years ago I attended a French wedding, of the third daughter of a contemporary of mine. A tradition there is that when a father marries off his last daughter, he puts a top hat on a special bonfire. Nice idea.
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I like that idea! So would my father - never a hat fan! That bonfire would've been ready burning for his, as his one and only daughter was still on her way to the reception! - if, of course, he'd worn a hat in the first place..... which he didn't.....
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Thank goodness we've moved on from there! Perhaps that sort of thing was where the tradition of the bride's father "giving her away" to her new husband came from?
Well, let's not be too hasty over this. Let's contextualise it.
In an era where (a) women could not, as a whole, expect to be able to earn a living for themselves ... they had to rely upon having a husband to provide for them; and (b) divorce was unobtainable except by those who could afford to obtain a private act of parliament; what WERE a married couple to do when they could no longer stand to live with one another.
I cannot comment on the auctions; but I suspect that many sales by private treaty were actually entirely amicable on all sides; the husband keen to be rid of a wife he had fallen out with; the wife willing to swap her vendor husband for the purchaser (with whom, I suspect, in many cases she had already committed adultery); and the purchaser willing to take on the vendor's wife.
I think the sale - and the changing hands of money - was necessary to show that the husband had willingly parted with his wife, so that he could not subsequently pursue any of the legal remedies that were available to a man whose wife had run off with another man in the days when wives were regarded as their husband's property (and he will, I am sure, have been only too aware that he had signed a receipt which furnished plentiful evidence to the effect that he was a willing party in all of this).
And why wait twelve years to marry?
Well, obviously, it would be bigamy to re-marry while you had a former spouse still living. So they had to wait until the original husband had died and the wife was free to re-marry.
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Sounds like another way of Slave trading 😊