January 12, 2026 • 23 mins
In late 17th-century England, it was almost impossible for anyone outside of the upper class to successfully get a divorce -- the process was expensive and required approval from both the church and the government. As a result, some couples agreed to end their unhappy marriages through a bizarre practice known as 'wife selling'. And, unfortunately, it's exactly what it sounds like.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow Ridiculous historians. We're returning with our regular classic episode,
(00:05):
ed Boy. This one threw us for a loop.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Take my wife taker.
Speaker 3 (00:12):
Oh gosh, yeah, tell big baby Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
In seventeenth century England, it was so incredibly difficult for
everybody who was not a one percenter to get a divorce.
You had to get the government to say yes, you
had to get the church.
Speaker 4 (00:30):
The annulment was much in demand.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
So as a result, some couples agreed to can persist
in unhappy marriages through a bizarre practice known as wife selling,
not swapping selling.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. I've often thought
(01:15):
that every single romantic relationship is like a country all
its own, with its own unique rules, its own unique
social moras and so on, and everybody else is, to
some degree or another, an outsider. But whenever we talk
about relationships in general, we run into some strange, complicated
and ridiculous things. Hi, I'm bet.
Speaker 5 (01:36):
Hey Ben, Sorry, I was confused. Where am I today?
It's been one of those I'm really fond of that EXPRESSI.
I think it's a good way of looking at it,
because it's like it's sort of like the whole idea
of we're all protagonist in our own story. Another expression,
you enjoy thank you?
Speaker 3 (01:52):
Yeah I do.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
I do enjoy it, and I enjoy hanging out on
this show ridiculous history.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
I'm having one of those days too. That's what we're doing.
Speaker 4 (02:03):
That's what we're doing. We're here for that reason, right,
we are here for that reason.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Oh great, that means that our super producer, Casey Pegram
is also here. Casey, I'm gonna lean back and wave
at you.
Speaker 4 (02:14):
He really did it.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
I got a thumbs up. So the three of us
are our people who have had our ups and downs
in love. Without getting too personal. Now we're not in
cells or anything. But you know, the course of true
love never did run smooth, as other people want to say.
And today's episode is about the end of some romantic relationships.
(02:36):
It's about the end of marriages, but not in the
typical way. Not a marriage that ended in divorce, not
a marriage that ended in death, not even a marriage
that ended in annulment. We're talking about something very strange today,
and it takes us all the way back to Mary
Old England.
Speaker 5 (02:56):
That's right, Ben, Between seventeen eighty and around eighteen fifty
there was a pretty fascinating and bizarre practice that had
gained popularity out of necessity really weirdly in England. It
was the practice of selling wives or wife selling. Yeah,
and it's not euphemism for anything, and that's literally what
(03:18):
it was.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
That's exactly what it sounds like. The BuzzFeed headline would
be an englishmen sell their wives. But there's more to
the story, and it's not the same kind of perhaps
human trafficking or chattel slavery that you might associate with
quote unquote selling a person. So let's journey back to
(03:41):
the seventeen fifties. Say, and you're an average you're an
average household, you're not aristocratic. Maybe you're working class or
lower working class, and you run into irreconcilable differences and
do you as maybe both of you decide and that
your marriage should your marriage should end, you should dissolve it.
(04:05):
Then you start looking into the process of dissolving your
marriage and you quickly learn some really depressing, difficult stuff.
Speaker 5 (04:12):
Yeah, there's depressing stuff on both sides of the equation.
For women of this time, one of the most depressing
factors was that they had no property rights. They were
basically considered Not only do they have no property rights themselves,
they themselves were basically considered the property of their husband,
and they had no recourse if the husband wanted to
(04:36):
annul the marriage. They themselves could not choose to ann
all the marriage. It was entirely up to the husband
to make this decision. Even worse, and this is something
that was bad for the husband. It was incredibly expensive
because there was no such thing as a divorce. The
first divorce didn't even come around until eighteen fifty seven.
So the only way to get separated legally was to
(04:59):
get a private Act of Parliament and then have it
be blessed by the Church. And that private act of
Parliament did not come cheap.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
It did not.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
And let's step back here for a second, because divorces
could occur, but they were something that was essentially relegated
to the higher class of people in society at the time.
Obtaining a private Act of Parliament would cost around three
thousand pounds, and that cost did not That cost was
(05:31):
essentially a note of exception to Britain's otherwise very very
strict law about divorce, and it still just got you
halfway through the game, because if the church didn't want
to give their blessing, then you were sol straight out
of luck. Since this is a family show, this was expensive.
(05:52):
This took a long time, and people eventually had to
find some sort of alternative plan. Also, three thousand pounds
for that Act of Parliament that is about if we
run it through the inflation calculator, that's about fifteen thousand
pounds in our modern age.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
And it's sane.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
Yeah, yeah, And that three thousand pounds is just the bottom,
the scraping the bottom, right, it could easily become a
higher fee three thousand, five hundred or so.
Speaker 4 (06:23):
What factors do you think would have led to any
fluctuation in the price?
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Nepotism really, I mean I think so. Yeah, if you
were if you're a let's say you are a member
of parliament, you're a lord an aristocrat of some sort,
then you have the funding to get this act passed through.
But it may have been a quid pro quote thing.
It may have been a mutual backscratching arrangement, right, and
(06:46):
so maybe if there wasn't some favor that you could
grant in addition to being able to pay this three
thousand pounds. Maybe they would up the price and they say, oh,
for you, buddy, it's four thousand, five hundred or something
like that. So there wasn't a strict schedule that decided
what people would pay exactly. And this was an annulment, right,
(07:11):
the average person could not afford an annulment. And again,
as we pointed out, these decisions were primarily made by
the dudes at the time. So instead, the husband would
do something that sounds very strange and disturbing. He would
take his spouse to the local marketplace or even a
cattle auction, a livestock auction. Then he would register his
(07:35):
wife as property to be sold, and symbolically, a rope
would be placed somewhere around her body.
Speaker 5 (07:43):
Right was this just like for the symbolism, Like, I
don't understand what the function of this rope was, is it?
Speaker 1 (07:49):
It feels symbolic, so strange, it feels symbolic. It would
be around the person's neck, their waist, or their wrist,
and then they would have to go stand up on
an auction blockle people bid on this human being.
Speaker 5 (08:04):
Because let's be real, I mean, if anything, maybe correct me,
if I'm not thinking about this stright away This is
sort of a loophole. They're trying to figure out a
semi legal way of doing this thing, of ridding themselves
of this unwonted property.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Yes, yes, spot on, you're absolutely right, because at this
time these people might not have any recourse and maybe
both the wife and the husband wish to part ways.
They may be cooperating in this regard. This is an
illegal practice, it's definitely a loophole, but the authorities, many
of whom probably could not afford a divorce themselves, would
(08:41):
turn a blind eye to it. It would get ignored
the way that some other minor infractions are ignored in
society today, like jaywalking for instance. Sure, you're rarely gonna
get busted for that. Did you know that the term
jaywalking was a conspiracy.
Speaker 5 (08:55):
Yeah, it was like it was trumped up as a
term of abuse for pedestrians.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Yep, that's that's exactly true, because this was during the
propagation of automobiles. Yeah, we have a car stuff episode
on it.
Speaker 5 (09:11):
I remember that, and there's a really great Adam Ruins
Everything episode about just how cars are actually quite terrible
and you know, infrastructure that's based around driving is really
just not very functional at all and YadA YadA, YadA.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
Oh I've got another one. While we're on the tangent.
Litterbug is another hit piece. It was created to take
the focus away from the amount of waste that goods
manufacturers create and put the focus on people. So it's
your job to take care of the waste. Brilliant Machavelian stuff.
Speaker 5 (09:43):
Total bait and switch are kind of like a sleight
of hand, kind of moved misdirection. There you go, press
the digitation man, you nailed that pronunciation.
Speaker 4 (09:50):
Man, that's a dung twister.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
We practiced that off air thanky editing that part out casey.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
But we're right.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
You know that this is a loophole. People are turning
a blind eye to it, and at times the description
of it seems almost jovial, you know, because what did
they do after they made this sale?
Speaker 5 (10:17):
They drank Probably they went to a bar. Yeah, yeah,
they set a divorce party. What's interesting about this, though, Ben,
is that there's something else going on beneath the surface,
because on first glance, this entire charade just seems just ugh,
grossly misogynistic, and of course it is, but there's an
(10:38):
aspect that we haven't talked about. Yet the woman actually
had like a veto vote over who she went with,
and she was likely just as ready to get out
of this marriage as the husband wants to be rid
of her. And this was, in a weird way, gave
her the ability to kind of control her destiny much
more than she would in an an allment where she
(11:00):
was just you know, thrown out of the street with
no property right.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
And we have found specific instances, documented occurrences of this happening.
It's not a rumor. There's a great article from the
Review of Behavioral Economics called wife Sales by Peter T.
Leeson and a few other authors, and they describe in
no uncertain terms specific situations where this occurs. There was
(11:27):
a gentleman named Moses Maggs who we have a quote
from in the course of attempting to sell his wife.
And I'm not going to do a voice, but it's
it's written in that way, that kind of condescending way
that authors of yesteryear would write whenever they thought someone
(11:48):
had a lower class accent. You know, there's a lot
of weird apostrophes, a lot of misspelled words, but here
it goes ladies and gentlemen, I act left to a post.
Speaker 4 (12:00):
Your notice.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Her is a good creature and goes pretty well in harness.
With a little flogging. Her can carry one hundred and
a half of coal's from the pit for three good miles.
Her can sell it well and put it down her
throat in less than three minutes. Now, my lads roll
up and bid spirited. I bought her through the turnpike
and paid the mond the toll for her. I brought
her with a halter and had her cried. Now, gentlemen,
(12:23):
who bids, go and go and go? And I can't delay,
As the auctioneer says, I can't dwell on this lot,
Come say six shillings.
Speaker 4 (12:31):
This is a horse you're talking about, right man?
Speaker 1 (12:33):
One would think nol. This is Moses Maggs selling his wife.
She consented to be sold. When they finished the transaction,
she was sold for six shillings and three gallons of ale.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
What was that part though, about putting her in some
sort of harness a halter? Yeah, well, I don't understand.
You're gonna have to help dissect this one for me
a little bit. Then there's something about coal carrying loads.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
It was talking about what that guy saw as the
skills of his former spouse.
Speaker 4 (13:07):
Jesus, I know.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
And there's a bit of a puzzle here, according to
these authors, because this sale of someone's spouse resulted in
the de facto dissolution of a marriage, because the DuJour,
the legal way was very, very difficult, but it wasn't
the only de facto way to dissolve a marriage. You
(13:29):
could have a judicial separation, or you could privately say, look,
no one has the time or money for a divorce,
but let's just go live separately, you know what I mean.
You could do those things. Sure, so's it's a bit
confusing for us to understand how this practice of selling
someone in a public space became not commonplace but became
(13:52):
a real thing.
Speaker 5 (13:52):
Yeah, And I was trying to kind of get to
a point about how this sort of afforded the wife
a bit more control than she would have had otherwise
by consentings.
Speaker 4 (14:04):
Like you said, she consented to be sold, even though
that got.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
A bit more agency, Yeah, a little.
Speaker 4 (14:09):
Bit more agency.
Speaker 5 (14:09):
And in this article from Other Board by Ben Richmond
called why wife selling was advantageous for wives that cites
that same paper by Peter Lison that you were talking about,
and he makes the point that in the records of
the Nearing around three hundred wives that were sold between
seventeen eighty and eighteen fifty, all signs point to almost
every single one of them being consensual or the wife
(14:33):
being all for it.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
And there's a great part of glaby of this article,
because there's a great part of there where they talk
about how the concept of marriage has evolved. You know,
in twenty nineteen, most of the time, when we think
of people marrying, at least in the Western world, we
think of people marrying because they have genuine affection for
(14:57):
one another, they like each other.
Speaker 4 (14:59):
Right.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
However, that wasn't the case, that's relatively recent. Until about
two hundred years ago, marriage was thought of as much
more of a transactional economic relationship.
Speaker 4 (15:11):
Absolutely. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
So justin E. H.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Smith, in an essay for Lapham's Quarterly, has the following
quote describing how marriage had been for the bulk of
human history. Marriage was for most of human history a
variety of exchange, one that consolidated social ties between families
or clans. And it's sort of like that conversation we've
had before about why people had so many more children
(15:38):
than they do now. Sure, at least in Europe and
in the US, it's because you would have children as
free labor and then as health insurance when you're elderly,
they would take care of you.
Speaker 4 (15:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (15:50):
And if that, what is it like a Craigslist post
sounding ad for that wife that was up for sale,
is any indication? I think wives were probably treated as
slave labor a bit. It's terrible, you know. But here's
the thing in the in the Motherboard article, Lison goes
on to point out something that I hadn't even considered.
Who are the ones that are in the market for
(16:10):
these as he refers to them used wives.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
Right or unhappy wives?
Speaker 4 (16:15):
Yeah? Exactly who is it? Well, it's a couple of
different possibilities.
Speaker 5 (16:18):
It could be folks who have just not have been
unlucky in love, you know, and just haven't done very
well in the traditional kind of marriage marketplace. It could
be uh, folks acting on behalf of wealthy individuals who
are just on the lookout for maybe maybe they're like
wealthy you know, widowers or something like that looking for
a new wife. Or it could actually be the families
(16:43):
of the wives themselves.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
Ah, I see, Yeah, Essentially, the economic argument here is
that wife sales permitted unhappy women to trade a marriage
that they didn't particularly care for with a marriage that
they valued more. So this seems like an improvised system
(17:10):
that was organically created to get around the laws of
the time, and it is still it's always going to
be a little bit puzzling because there were other avenues
for de facto divorce. But Leason his team found that
wife sales benefited wives rather than harmed them, and they
(17:32):
argue that without this institution, at least some unhappy spouses
in industrial revolutionary England would have remained trapped in inefficient
marriages that they wanted to exit. I'm laughing at the
phrase inefficient because it's weird to hear economists describe marriage.
They weigh in on it in the following perspective. The
(17:54):
way that we think of marriage from an economic perspective
is to think about how much each of the spouse's
value being in the marriage relative to one another and
relative to living outside the marriage. So it makes sense
to me that an economist would look at this from
a value based, transactional perspective rather than like the love
(18:15):
the you know, the romance the sticking together for the kids,
all the things that are so common today. Right, it
seems that we are in a very privileged position where
we have more agency in our own relationships. Regardless of
who you are and how you identify. The truth of
the matter is that you can marry people because you
(18:38):
like them now instead of needing to, you know, end
the blood feud between your clans, or to get a
dowry and so on. What even as a dowry, it's
the it's the payoff that the bride's family gives to
the group.
Speaker 4 (18:55):
So it's just a cash, cash offering basically.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
I think it could be it could be a bar
ordering thing. It could be property. It's brought like you marry,
you agree to marry someone, at least traditionally, and then
the bride comes with maybe it's maybe it's land, right,
maybe it's livestock. Maybe it's just straight up cash.
Speaker 4 (19:18):
But you know, loophole this thing was.
Speaker 5 (19:20):
It really started to kind of lose its luster, and
husbands who were trying to sell their wives kind of
became a little bit looked at his social pariahs.
Speaker 4 (19:31):
And it just wasn't done, you know what I mean.
Speaker 5 (19:34):
So the practice kind of went away, but apparently the
vintage news rights that they found a case as recently
as nineteen thirteen when a woman said that her husband
sold her to one of his work buddies for one pound.
Speaker 4 (19:50):
So that's obviously an outlier, but yeah, what.
Speaker 5 (19:53):
An interesting practice, and the whole idea that it was
somehow better than the alternative for women.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
Yeah, yeah, So the decline of wife sales largely coincided
with the rise of more equal property rights and the
ease of getting a legitimate or djure divorce. Also, the
speeches from these people who are attempting to sell their
(20:24):
spouses are so strange. For instance, there's one guy in
eighteen thirty two, I just want to list this off.
He lists his spouses bad and good qualities as he
saw them. He called her a born serpent and advised
prospective buyers to avoid frolicsome women as you would a
(20:44):
mad dog, a roaring lion, a loaded pistol, or cholera.
Then he listed her assets, which included the ability to
milk cows, the ability to sing well, and to be
a great drinking companion. And apparently they were still friends afterward,
which is to me just the strangest thing. And you know,
(21:05):
if you are listening and you are married, or you
have been married, or you are engaged, congratulations. I absolutely
wish you the best. Please, please, please, whatever you do,
don't try to sell your spouse. Just don't do it.
It's so weird.
Speaker 4 (21:23):
It's a bad look.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
It's not a good look.
Speaker 4 (21:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
It's poor, poor form, very poor form. And thankfully, in
this day and age, it is illegal.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (21:33):
I mean it was illegal back then, but the authorities
seem perfectly willing to throw to turn a blind eye
to it.
Speaker 4 (21:39):
Certainly would not be the case today.
Speaker 5 (21:40):
I think this would be highly frowned upon and you
probably wouldn't be able.
Speaker 4 (21:45):
To get away with it. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
Human trafficking. That's that's the word.
Speaker 4 (21:48):
That's the word.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
We hope that you enjoyed today's episode, and as always,
we would love to hear some of your takes, your feedback,
or your understanding of similar situations if some occurred in
your neck of the Global Woods. You can find us
on Instagram, you can find us on Facebook. You can
speak with your fellow Ridiculous historians on our Facebook page
(22:10):
Ridiculous Historians.
Speaker 5 (22:12):
Yeah, if you want to check out me and my
various adventures around town with my weird ten year old.
You can check me out at Embryonic Insight on Instagram.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
And I believe when this episode comes out, I'll either
have just returned or be on the way to the DMZ,
So if you want to see some pictures of that,
follow me on at Ben Bolan at Instagram. Thank you,
super producer, Casey Pegram. Thanks to our research associate, Eve's
jeffcot who we really should have on the show at
(22:41):
some point.
Speaker 5 (22:41):
She's got some really cool stuff brewing. Thanks to Alex
Williams who composed the theme, and thanks to you Ben
Bollin for being.
Speaker 4 (22:48):
A pal and a cohort. Likewise, Noel, thank you.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
And luckily I did not find a comic book that
I'm pertained to today's topic that was worth recommending, which
I think is a good sign for society overall.
Speaker 4 (23:03):
Agreed, See you next time, folks.
Speaker 5 (23:12):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Fellow Ridiculous historians. We're returning with our regular classic episode,
(00:05):
ed Boy. This one threw us for a loop.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Take my wife taker.
Speaker 3 (00:12):
Oh gosh, yeah, tell big baby Yeah.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
In seventeenth century England, it was so incredibly difficult for
everybody who was not a one percenter to get a divorce.
You had to get the government to say yes, you
had to get the church.
Speaker 4 (00:30):
The annulment was much in demand.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
So as a result, some couples agreed to can persist
in unhappy marriages through a bizarre practice known as wife selling,
not swapping selling.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. I've often thought
(01:15):
that every single romantic relationship is like a country all
its own, with its own unique rules, its own unique
social moras and so on, and everybody else is, to
some degree or another, an outsider. But whenever we talk
about relationships in general, we run into some strange, complicated
and ridiculous things. Hi, I'm bet.
Speaker 5 (01:36):
Hey Ben, Sorry, I was confused. Where am I today?
It's been one of those I'm really fond of that EXPRESSI.
I think it's a good way of looking at it,
because it's like it's sort of like the whole idea
of we're all protagonist in our own story. Another expression,
you enjoy thank you?
Speaker 3 (01:52):
Yeah I do.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
I do enjoy it, and I enjoy hanging out on
this show ridiculous history.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
I'm having one of those days too. That's what we're doing.
Speaker 4 (02:03):
That's what we're doing. We're here for that reason, right,
we are here for that reason.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Oh great, that means that our super producer, Casey Pegram
is also here. Casey, I'm gonna lean back and wave
at you.
Speaker 4 (02:14):
He really did it.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
I got a thumbs up. So the three of us
are our people who have had our ups and downs
in love. Without getting too personal. Now we're not in
cells or anything. But you know, the course of true
love never did run smooth, as other people want to say.
And today's episode is about the end of some romantic relationships.
(02:36):
It's about the end of marriages, but not in the
typical way. Not a marriage that ended in divorce, not
a marriage that ended in death, not even a marriage
that ended in annulment. We're talking about something very strange today,
and it takes us all the way back to Mary
Old England.
Speaker 5 (02:56):
That's right, Ben, Between seventeen eighty and around eighteen fifty
there was a pretty fascinating and bizarre practice that had
gained popularity out of necessity really weirdly in England. It
was the practice of selling wives or wife selling. Yeah,
and it's not euphemism for anything, and that's literally what
(03:18):
it was.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
That's exactly what it sounds like. The BuzzFeed headline would
be an englishmen sell their wives. But there's more to
the story, and it's not the same kind of perhaps
human trafficking or chattel slavery that you might associate with
quote unquote selling a person. So let's journey back to
(03:41):
the seventeen fifties. Say, and you're an average you're an
average household, you're not aristocratic. Maybe you're working class or
lower working class, and you run into irreconcilable differences and
do you as maybe both of you decide and that
your marriage should your marriage should end, you should dissolve it.
(04:05):
Then you start looking into the process of dissolving your
marriage and you quickly learn some really depressing, difficult stuff.
Speaker 5 (04:12):
Yeah, there's depressing stuff on both sides of the equation.
For women of this time, one of the most depressing
factors was that they had no property rights. They were
basically considered Not only do they have no property rights themselves,
they themselves were basically considered the property of their husband,
and they had no recourse if the husband wanted to
(04:36):
annul the marriage. They themselves could not choose to ann
all the marriage. It was entirely up to the husband
to make this decision. Even worse, and this is something
that was bad for the husband. It was incredibly expensive
because there was no such thing as a divorce. The
first divorce didn't even come around until eighteen fifty seven.
So the only way to get separated legally was to
(04:59):
get a private Act of Parliament and then have it
be blessed by the Church. And that private act of
Parliament did not come cheap.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
It did not.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
And let's step back here for a second, because divorces
could occur, but they were something that was essentially relegated
to the higher class of people in society at the time.
Obtaining a private Act of Parliament would cost around three
thousand pounds, and that cost did not That cost was
(05:31):
essentially a note of exception to Britain's otherwise very very
strict law about divorce, and it still just got you
halfway through the game, because if the church didn't want
to give their blessing, then you were sol straight out
of luck. Since this is a family show, this was expensive.
(05:52):
This took a long time, and people eventually had to
find some sort of alternative plan. Also, three thousand pounds
for that Act of Parliament that is about if we
run it through the inflation calculator, that's about fifteen thousand
pounds in our modern age.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
And it's sane.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
Yeah, yeah, And that three thousand pounds is just the bottom,
the scraping the bottom, right, it could easily become a
higher fee three thousand, five hundred or so.
Speaker 4 (06:23):
What factors do you think would have led to any
fluctuation in the price?
Speaker 1 (06:26):
Nepotism really, I mean I think so. Yeah, if you
were if you're a let's say you are a member
of parliament, you're a lord an aristocrat of some sort,
then you have the funding to get this act passed through.
But it may have been a quid pro quote thing.
It may have been a mutual backscratching arrangement, right, and
(06:46):
so maybe if there wasn't some favor that you could
grant in addition to being able to pay this three
thousand pounds. Maybe they would up the price and they say, oh,
for you, buddy, it's four thousand, five hundred or something
like that. So there wasn't a strict schedule that decided
what people would pay exactly. And this was an annulment, right,
(07:11):
the average person could not afford an annulment. And again,
as we pointed out, these decisions were primarily made by
the dudes at the time. So instead, the husband would
do something that sounds very strange and disturbing. He would
take his spouse to the local marketplace or even a
cattle auction, a livestock auction. Then he would register his
(07:35):
wife as property to be sold, and symbolically, a rope
would be placed somewhere around her body.
Speaker 5 (07:43):
Right was this just like for the symbolism, Like, I
don't understand what the function of this rope was, is it?
Speaker 1 (07:49):
It feels symbolic, so strange, it feels symbolic. It would
be around the person's neck, their waist, or their wrist,
and then they would have to go stand up on
an auction blockle people bid on this human being.
Speaker 5 (08:04):
Because let's be real, I mean, if anything, maybe correct me,
if I'm not thinking about this stright away This is
sort of a loophole. They're trying to figure out a
semi legal way of doing this thing, of ridding themselves
of this unwonted property.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Yes, yes, spot on, you're absolutely right, because at this
time these people might not have any recourse and maybe
both the wife and the husband wish to part ways.
They may be cooperating in this regard. This is an
illegal practice, it's definitely a loophole, but the authorities, many
of whom probably could not afford a divorce themselves, would
(08:41):
turn a blind eye to it. It would get ignored
the way that some other minor infractions are ignored in
society today, like jaywalking for instance. Sure, you're rarely gonna
get busted for that. Did you know that the term
jaywalking was a conspiracy.
Speaker 5 (08:55):
Yeah, it was like it was trumped up as a
term of abuse for pedestrians.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Yep, that's that's exactly true, because this was during the
propagation of automobiles. Yeah, we have a car stuff episode
on it.
Speaker 5 (09:11):
I remember that, and there's a really great Adam Ruins
Everything episode about just how cars are actually quite terrible
and you know, infrastructure that's based around driving is really
just not very functional at all and YadA YadA, YadA.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
Oh I've got another one. While we're on the tangent.
Litterbug is another hit piece. It was created to take
the focus away from the amount of waste that goods
manufacturers create and put the focus on people. So it's
your job to take care of the waste. Brilliant Machavelian stuff.
Speaker 5 (09:43):
Total bait and switch are kind of like a sleight
of hand, kind of moved misdirection. There you go, press
the digitation man, you nailed that pronunciation.
Speaker 4 (09:50):
Man, that's a dung twister.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
We practiced that off air thanky editing that part out casey.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
But we're right.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
You know that this is a loophole. People are turning
a blind eye to it, and at times the description
of it seems almost jovial, you know, because what did
they do after they made this sale?
Speaker 5 (10:17):
They drank Probably they went to a bar. Yeah, yeah,
they set a divorce party. What's interesting about this, though, Ben,
is that there's something else going on beneath the surface,
because on first glance, this entire charade just seems just ugh,
grossly misogynistic, and of course it is, but there's an
(10:38):
aspect that we haven't talked about. Yet the woman actually
had like a veto vote over who she went with,
and she was likely just as ready to get out
of this marriage as the husband wants to be rid
of her. And this was, in a weird way, gave
her the ability to kind of control her destiny much
more than she would in an an allment where she
(11:00):
was just you know, thrown out of the street with
no property right.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
And we have found specific instances, documented occurrences of this happening.
It's not a rumor. There's a great article from the
Review of Behavioral Economics called wife Sales by Peter T.
Leeson and a few other authors, and they describe in
no uncertain terms specific situations where this occurs. There was
(11:27):
a gentleman named Moses Maggs who we have a quote
from in the course of attempting to sell his wife.
And I'm not going to do a voice, but it's
it's written in that way, that kind of condescending way
that authors of yesteryear would write whenever they thought someone
(11:48):
had a lower class accent. You know, there's a lot
of weird apostrophes, a lot of misspelled words, but here
it goes ladies and gentlemen, I act left to a post.
Speaker 4 (12:00):
Your notice.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
Her is a good creature and goes pretty well in harness.
With a little flogging. Her can carry one hundred and
a half of coal's from the pit for three good miles.
Her can sell it well and put it down her
throat in less than three minutes. Now, my lads roll
up and bid spirited. I bought her through the turnpike
and paid the mond the toll for her. I brought
her with a halter and had her cried. Now, gentlemen,
(12:23):
who bids, go and go and go? And I can't delay,
As the auctioneer says, I can't dwell on this lot,
Come say six shillings.
Speaker 4 (12:31):
This is a horse you're talking about, right man?
Speaker 1 (12:33):
One would think nol. This is Moses Maggs selling his wife.
She consented to be sold. When they finished the transaction,
she was sold for six shillings and three gallons of ale.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
What was that part though, about putting her in some
sort of harness a halter? Yeah, well, I don't understand.
You're gonna have to help dissect this one for me
a little bit. Then there's something about coal carrying loads.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
It was talking about what that guy saw as the
skills of his former spouse.
Speaker 4 (13:07):
Jesus, I know.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
And there's a bit of a puzzle here, according to
these authors, because this sale of someone's spouse resulted in
the de facto dissolution of a marriage, because the DuJour,
the legal way was very, very difficult, but it wasn't
the only de facto way to dissolve a marriage. You
(13:29):
could have a judicial separation, or you could privately say, look,
no one has the time or money for a divorce,
but let's just go live separately, you know what I mean.
You could do those things. Sure, so's it's a bit
confusing for us to understand how this practice of selling
someone in a public space became not commonplace but became
(13:52):
a real thing.
Speaker 5 (13:52):
Yeah, And I was trying to kind of get to
a point about how this sort of afforded the wife
a bit more control than she would have had otherwise
by consentings.
Speaker 4 (14:04):
Like you said, she consented to be sold, even though
that got.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
A bit more agency, Yeah, a little.
Speaker 4 (14:09):
Bit more agency.
Speaker 5 (14:09):
And in this article from Other Board by Ben Richmond
called why wife selling was advantageous for wives that cites
that same paper by Peter Lison that you were talking about,
and he makes the point that in the records of
the Nearing around three hundred wives that were sold between
seventeen eighty and eighteen fifty, all signs point to almost
every single one of them being consensual or the wife
(14:33):
being all for it.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
And there's a great part of glaby of this article,
because there's a great part of there where they talk
about how the concept of marriage has evolved. You know,
in twenty nineteen, most of the time, when we think
of people marrying, at least in the Western world, we
think of people marrying because they have genuine affection for
(14:57):
one another, they like each other.
Speaker 4 (14:59):
Right.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
However, that wasn't the case, that's relatively recent. Until about
two hundred years ago, marriage was thought of as much
more of a transactional economic relationship.
Speaker 4 (15:11):
Absolutely. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
So justin E. H.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Smith, in an essay for Lapham's Quarterly, has the following
quote describing how marriage had been for the bulk of
human history. Marriage was for most of human history a
variety of exchange, one that consolidated social ties between families
or clans. And it's sort of like that conversation we've
had before about why people had so many more children
(15:38):
than they do now. Sure, at least in Europe and
in the US, it's because you would have children as
free labor and then as health insurance when you're elderly,
they would take care of you.
Speaker 4 (15:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (15:50):
And if that, what is it like a Craigslist post
sounding ad for that wife that was up for sale,
is any indication? I think wives were probably treated as
slave labor a bit. It's terrible, you know. But here's
the thing in the in the Motherboard article, Lison goes
on to point out something that I hadn't even considered.
Who are the ones that are in the market for
(16:10):
these as he refers to them used wives.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
Right or unhappy wives?
Speaker 4 (16:15):
Yeah? Exactly who is it? Well, it's a couple of
different possibilities.
Speaker 5 (16:18):
It could be folks who have just not have been
unlucky in love, you know, and just haven't done very
well in the traditional kind of marriage marketplace. It could
be uh, folks acting on behalf of wealthy individuals who
are just on the lookout for maybe maybe they're like
wealthy you know, widowers or something like that looking for
a new wife. Or it could actually be the families
(16:43):
of the wives themselves.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
Ah, I see, Yeah, Essentially, the economic argument here is
that wife sales permitted unhappy women to trade a marriage
that they didn't particularly care for with a marriage that
they valued more. So this seems like an improvised system
(17:10):
that was organically created to get around the laws of
the time, and it is still it's always going to
be a little bit puzzling because there were other avenues
for de facto divorce. But Leason his team found that
wife sales benefited wives rather than harmed them, and they
(17:32):
argue that without this institution, at least some unhappy spouses
in industrial revolutionary England would have remained trapped in inefficient
marriages that they wanted to exit. I'm laughing at the
phrase inefficient because it's weird to hear economists describe marriage.
They weigh in on it in the following perspective. The
(17:54):
way that we think of marriage from an economic perspective
is to think about how much each of the spouse's
value being in the marriage relative to one another and
relative to living outside the marriage. So it makes sense
to me that an economist would look at this from
a value based, transactional perspective rather than like the love
(18:15):
the you know, the romance the sticking together for the kids,
all the things that are so common today. Right, it
seems that we are in a very privileged position where
we have more agency in our own relationships. Regardless of
who you are and how you identify. The truth of
the matter is that you can marry people because you
(18:38):
like them now instead of needing to, you know, end
the blood feud between your clans, or to get a
dowry and so on. What even as a dowry, it's
the it's the payoff that the bride's family gives to
the group.
Speaker 4 (18:55):
So it's just a cash, cash offering basically.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
I think it could be it could be a bar
ordering thing. It could be property. It's brought like you marry,
you agree to marry someone, at least traditionally, and then
the bride comes with maybe it's maybe it's land, right,
maybe it's livestock. Maybe it's just straight up cash.
Speaker 4 (19:18):
But you know, loophole this thing was.
Speaker 5 (19:20):
It really started to kind of lose its luster, and
husbands who were trying to sell their wives kind of
became a little bit looked at his social pariahs.
Speaker 4 (19:31):
And it just wasn't done, you know what I mean.
Speaker 5 (19:34):
So the practice kind of went away, but apparently the
vintage news rights that they found a case as recently
as nineteen thirteen when a woman said that her husband
sold her to one of his work buddies for one pound.
Speaker 4 (19:50):
So that's obviously an outlier, but yeah, what.
Speaker 5 (19:53):
An interesting practice, and the whole idea that it was
somehow better than the alternative for women.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
Yeah, yeah, So the decline of wife sales largely coincided
with the rise of more equal property rights and the
ease of getting a legitimate or djure divorce. Also, the
speeches from these people who are attempting to sell their
(20:24):
spouses are so strange. For instance, there's one guy in
eighteen thirty two, I just want to list this off.
He lists his spouses bad and good qualities as he
saw them. He called her a born serpent and advised
prospective buyers to avoid frolicsome women as you would a
(20:44):
mad dog, a roaring lion, a loaded pistol, or cholera.
Then he listed her assets, which included the ability to
milk cows, the ability to sing well, and to be
a great drinking companion. And apparently they were still friends afterward,
which is to me just the strangest thing. And you know,
(21:05):
if you are listening and you are married, or you
have been married, or you are engaged, congratulations. I absolutely
wish you the best. Please, please, please, whatever you do,
don't try to sell your spouse. Just don't do it.
It's so weird.
Speaker 4 (21:23):
It's a bad look.
Speaker 3 (21:24):
It's not a good look.
Speaker 4 (21:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
It's poor, poor form, very poor form. And thankfully, in
this day and age, it is illegal.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (21:33):
I mean it was illegal back then, but the authorities
seem perfectly willing to throw to turn a blind eye
to it.
Speaker 4 (21:39):
Certainly would not be the case today.
Speaker 5 (21:40):
I think this would be highly frowned upon and you
probably wouldn't be able.
Speaker 4 (21:45):
To get away with it. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (21:46):
Human trafficking. That's that's the word.
Speaker 4 (21:48):
That's the word.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
We hope that you enjoyed today's episode, and as always,
we would love to hear some of your takes, your feedback,
or your understanding of similar situations if some occurred in
your neck of the Global Woods. You can find us
on Instagram, you can find us on Facebook. You can
speak with your fellow Ridiculous historians on our Facebook page
(22:10):
Ridiculous Historians.
Speaker 5 (22:12):
Yeah, if you want to check out me and my
various adventures around town with my weird ten year old.
You can check me out at Embryonic Insight on Instagram.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
And I believe when this episode comes out, I'll either
have just returned or be on the way to the DMZ,
So if you want to see some pictures of that,
follow me on at Ben Bolan at Instagram. Thank you,
super producer, Casey Pegram. Thanks to our research associate, Eve's
jeffcot who we really should have on the show at
(22:41):
some point.
Speaker 5 (22:41):
She's got some really cool stuff brewing. Thanks to Alex
Williams who composed the theme, and thanks to you Ben
Bollin for being.
Speaker 4 (22:48):
A pal and a cohort. Likewise, Noel, thank you.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
And luckily I did not find a comic book that
I'm pertained to today's topic that was worth recommending, which
I think is a good sign for society overall.
Speaker 4 (23:03):
Agreed, See you next time, folks.
Speaker 5 (23:12):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
Popular Podcasts
Two Guys, Five Rings: Matt, Bowen & The Olympics
Two Guys (Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers). Five Rings (you know, from the Olympics logo). One essential podcast for the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics. Bowen Yang (SNL, Wicked) and Matt Rogers (Palm Royale, No Good Deed) of Las Culturistas are back for a second season of Two Guys, Five Rings, a collaboration with NBC Sports and iHeartRadio. In this 15-episode event, Bowen and Matt discuss the top storylines, obsess over Italian culture, and find out what really goes on in the Olympic Village.
iHeartOlympics: The Latest
Listen to the latest news from the 2026 Winter Olympics.
Milan Cortina Winter Olympics
The 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan Cortina are here and have everyone talking. iHeartPodcasts is buzzing with content in honor of the XXV Winter Olympics We’re bringing you episodes from a variety of iHeartPodcast shows to help you keep up with the action. Follow Milan Cortina Winter Olympics so you don’t miss any coverage of the 2026 Winter Olympics, and if you like what you hear, be sure to follow each Podcast in the feed for more great content from iHeartPodcasts.