CLASSIC: English Men Used to Sell Their Wives

Summary

Ridiculous History: “CLASSIC: English Men Used to Sell Their Wives”

iHeartPodcasts | January 12, 2026
Hosts: Ben Bolan, Noel Brown

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Ben and Noel travel back to 17th–19th century England to unravel the bizarre historical practice of “wife selling.” With wit and a skeptical eye, they explore why English men—unable to legally or affordably divorce—opted to publicly sell their wives as a loophole to escape unhappy marriages. The hosts dissect how this strange ritual functioned, the economic and social circumstances that drove it, how it was perceived by contemporaries, and whether the practice provided women with agency or further entrenched misogyny.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Divorce in Historical England

• Legal Hurdles for Ending Marriages

  • Divorce was unattainable for average people; you needed either the government or church’s explicit approval (03:00–07:00).

  • Private acts of Parliament were required for legal separation, costing up to £3,000—equivalent to about £15,000 today (07:13–08:17).

    “Obtaining a private act of Parliament would cost around £3,000… that’s about £15,000 in our modern age.”
    —Ben Bolan (07:13)

• Impact on Women

  • Women lacked property rights and had no legal say; they were, in effect, considered property of their husbands (06:18–07:13).
  • The system overwhelmingly favored the wealthy and men, making alternatives desperately sought after by commoners.

2. The Practice of Wife Selling

• How It Worked

  • A husband would publicly sell his wife, often at a local market or cattle auction. Symbolically, a rope was tied around the woman’s neck, waist, or wrist (08:28–09:56).

  • Although illegal, authorities and communities often turned a blind eye due to the impracticality of legal divorce for working-class citizens (10:09–10:57).

    “He would take his spouse to the local marketplace…Then he would register his wife as property to be sold. And symbolically, a rope would be placed somewhere around her body.”
    —Ben Bolan (08:28)

• Social and Legal Loophole

  • Wife selling acted as a makeshift, publicly recognized (but unofficial) divorce. In some instances, both parties participated amicably when they sought to part ways (10:23–10:57).

3. Symbolism, Societal Attitudes, and Surprising Agency

• Ritual and Aftermath

  • The event sometimes resembled a jovial affair, with “divorce parties” at local pubs post-transaction (16:10–16:29).

  • Despite the overt misogyny, in many cases, women had veto power over who “purchased” them and could consent to the transfer, allowing for an atypical (for the time) form of agency (16:29–21:17).

    “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 was to be rid of her.”
    —Noel (16:29)

• Examples from History

  • Ben reads the colorful auction spiel of Moses Maggs, who sold his wife for six shillings and three gallons of ale (18:40–18:58). The language evokes treating women as livestock and illustrates the sometimes demeaning tone of these transactions.

    “Her’s a good creature and goes pretty well in harness…with a little flogging, her can carry a hundred and a half of coals…”
    —Ben Bolan, quoting an 18th-century auctioneer (17:55–18:40)

• Who Bought Wives?

  • Buyers ranged from single men to widowers and even the woman’s own family (22:25–22:54).

    “It could be folks acting on behalf of wealthy individuals... or it could actually be the families of the wives themselves.”
    —Noel (22:25)

4. Economic and Social Interpretation

• An Economic “Solution”

  • Economists cited in Review of Behavioral Economics argue wife selling could offer unhappy women a path to escape. Approximately 300 documented instances suggest most such sales were consensual (19:49–21:20).

    “...wife sales permitted unhappy women to trade a marriage that they didn’t particularly care for with a marriage that they valued more.”
    —Ben Bolan (22:54)

• Changing Concepts of Marriage

  • The notion of marriage as love-based is a modern one; historically, it was economic, transactional, and inter-family (20:44–22:00).

5. Decline and Modern Perspectives

• Fading of the Practice

  • As property rights for women improved and divorce became more accessible, wife selling faded by the early 20th century (25:27–26:12).

  • The hosts highlight a rare case as late as 1913 in which a woman was sold for £1 (25:27).

    “The decline of wife sales largely coincided with the rise of more equal property rights and the ease of getting a legitimate divorce.”
    —Ben Bolan (26:12)

• Reflection on Absurdity

  • Ben and Noel wrap up with astonishment at the auctioneers’ language and remind listeners that—thankfully—such practices are now illegal and unthinkable (26:12–27:57).

    “Please, please, please, whatever you do, don’t try to sell your spouse. Just don’t do it. It’s so weird.”
    —Ben Bolan (27:32)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “It sounds very strange and disturbing.”
  —Ben Bolan, on the symbolism of the rope in wife sales (08:28)
• “This charade just seems grossly misogynistic. And of course it is. But… the woman actually had a veto vote…”
  —Noel (16:29)
• “‘Her’s a good creature and goes pretty well in harness…with a little flogging, her can carry a hundred and a half of coals…’”
  —Ben Bolan reading Moses Maggs’ 18th-century auction pitch (17:55–18:40)
• “The practice kind of went away. But apparently the Vintage News writes they found a case as recently as 1913…”
  —Noel (25:27)
• “It’s a bad look.”
  —Noel (27:32)

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Key Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment | |-------------|------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 03:00–07:13 | Context: Divorce difficulties and cost in England | | 08:28–09:56 | Mechanics and symbolism of wife selling | | 10:09–10:57 | Social loophole; authorities’ responses | | 16:29–21:17 | Women’s role & agency in the process | | 17:55–18:40 | Read-aloud: Moses Maggs’ wife auction spiel | | 22:25–22:54 | Who bought wives? | | 25:27–26:12 | Decline of practice; the 1913 outlier | | 26:12–27:57 | Modern perspective & advice |

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Tone and Style

Ben and Noel use a conversational, irreverent, and often tongue-in-cheek tone to highlight the absurdity (“It’s a bad look”), but also show respectful curiosity for the historical context and for those involved. They frequently pivot between humor and thoughtful reflection, making the episode both engaging and educational.

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Summary

This episode provides a fascinating, at times darkly comedic, exploration of the lengths to which people in historical England went to circumvent unjust and impractical marriage laws. Through storytelling, quotes, and cutting commentary, Ben and Noel lay bare both the misogyny and the unexpected forms of agency found in the practice of wife selling. They close with relief that such things are firmly in the past and encourage listeners to reflect on the oddities of history—and how far we’ve come.

Transcript

[Ben Bolan]

Fellow ridiculous historians, we're returning with our regular classic episode. And boy, this one threw us for a loop.

[Noel]

Take my wife. Seriously, Take her.

[Ben Bolan]

Oh my gosh. Yeah, take her. But baby, yeah. In 17th century England, it was so incredibly difficult for everybody who is not a 1 percenter to get a divorce. You had to get the government to say yes. You had to get the church.

[Noel]

The annulment was much in demand, so as a result, some couples agreed to persist in unhappy marriages through a bizarre practice known as wife selling. Not swapping, selling.

[Podcast Announcer]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Are we exposed? Security teams ask this every day. Vulnerabilities across network, cloud, AI and OT silos hide the truth and attackers are watching. Tenable unifies your tools, teams and data so you can spot and close risks fast. Tenable's AI powered exposure management gives teams one view of risk, helping them focus, take action and close critical exposures fast. Visit tenable.com tenable. Your exposure ends here.

[Evan Ratliff]

Hi, Kyle, could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link? Thanks.

[Ben Bolan]

Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link.

[Evan Ratliff]

But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff, here with the story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people. Check out the second season of my podcast Shell Game on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Podcast Announcer]

On June 11, 1998, a deputy from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department went missing.

[Ben Bolan]

Hey, if they'll kill a cop and bury him, what are they gonna do to me?

[Podcast Announcer]

What really happened to the missing deputy? Valley of Shadows, a new series from Pushkin Industries about crime and corruption in California's high desert. Listen to Valley of shadows on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Brad Palumbo]

The social media trend is landing some gen zers in jail. The progressive media darling whose public meltdown got her fired, and the massive TikTok boycott against Target. That actually makes no sense. You won't hear about these online stories in the mainstream media, but you can keep up with them and all the other entertaining and outrageous things happening online in media and in Politics with the Brad vs. Everyone podcast. Listen to the Brad vs. Everyone podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ben Bolan]

Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartradio. I've often thought that every single romantic relationship is like a country all its own, with its own unique rules, its own unique social mores 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. How. Hi, I'm Ben.

[Noel]

Hey, Ben. I'm Noel.

[Ben Bolan]

Hey, Noel.

[Noel]

I'm sorry, I was confused there. Where am I today? It's been one of those. I'm really fond of that expression. I think it's a good way of looking at it because it's sort of like the whole idea of we're all protagonists in our own story. Another expression you enjoy.

[Ben Bolan]

Thank you. Yeah, I do. I do enjoy it. And I enjoy hanging out on this show. Ridiculous history. That's right. I'm having one of those days, too. That's what we're doing.

[Noel]

That's what we're doing.

[Ben Bolan]

We're here for that reason. Right?

[Noel]

We are here for that reason.

[Ben Bolan]

Oh, great. That means that our super producer, Casey Pegram is also here. Casey, I'm gonna lean back and wave at you.

[Noel]

He really did it.

[Ben Bolan]

I got a thumbs up. So the three of us are people who have had our ups and downs in love without getting too personal. Now, we're not incels or anything, but the course of true love never did run smooth, as other people would want to say. And today's episode is about the end of some romantic relationships. 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 merry old England.

[Noel]

That's right, Ben. Between 1780 and around 1850, there was a pretty fascinating and bizarre practice that gained popularity out of necessity, really. Weirdly, in England, it was the practice of selling wives, or wife selling.

[Ben Bolan]

Yeah.

[Noel]

And it's not a euphemism for anything. And that's literally what it was.

[Ben Bolan]

That's exactly what it sounds like. The buzzfeed headline would be, 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 the 1750s, 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 you, as maybe both of you decide amicably that your marriage should end, you should dissolve it. Then you start looking into the process of dissolving your marriage and you quickly learn some really depressing, difficult stuff.

[Noel]

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 did 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 annul the marriage. They themselves could not choose to annul 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 1857. So the only way to get separated legally was to 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.

[Ben Bolan]

It did not. 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 £3,000. And that cost did not. That cost was 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. This took a long time and people eventually had to find some sort of alternative plan. Also £3,000 for that act of Parliament that is about, if we run it through the inflation calculator, that's about £15,000 in our modern age.

[Noel]

It's insane.

[Ben Bolan]

Yeah, yeah. And that £3,000 is just the bottom, the scraping the bottom. Right. It could easily become a higher fee, 3,500 or so.

[Noel]

What factors do you think would have led to any fluctuation in the price?

[Ben Bolan]

Nep. Really? I mean, I think so, yeah. If you are, if you are 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 quo thing, it may have been a mutual back scratching arrangement. Right. And so maybe if there wasn't some favor that you could grant in addition to being able to pay this £3,000, maybe they would up the price and they say, oh, for you, buddy, it's 4500 or something like that. So there wasn't a strict schedule that decided what people would pay. Exactly. And this was an annulment, Right. 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 wife as property to be sold. And symbolically, a rope would be placed somewhere around her body.

[Noel]

Was this just like. For the symbolism? I don't understand what the function of this rope was.

[Ben Bolan]

It feels symbolic.

[Noel]

It's so str.

[Ben Bolan]

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 block while people bid on this human being.

[Noel]

Well, cause let's be real. I mean, if anything, maybe. Correct me if I'm not thinking about this the right way. 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 unwanted property.

[Ben Bolan]

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 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. You're rarely gonna get busted for that.

[Noel]

Did you know that the term jaywalking was a conspiracy? Yeah, it was like it was trumped up as a term of abuse for pedestrians.

[Ben Bolan]

Yep, that's exactly true. Because this was during the propagation of automobiles, right? Yeah. We have a car stuff episode on it. History of jaywalk.

[Noel]

That's right. 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.

[Ben Bolan]

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, Machiavellian stuff.

[Noel]

Total bait and switch. Or kind of like a sleight of hand kind of move.

[Ben Bolan]

Misdirection.

[Noel]

There you go.

[Ben Bolan]

Prestidigitation.

[Noel]

Man, you nailed that pronunciation, man. That's a tongue twister.

[Ben Bolan]

We practiced that off air.

[Noel]

Hey, come on.

[Ben Bolan]

Thanks for editing that part out, Casey.

[Evan Ratliff]

Hi Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan? Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks.

[Ben Bolan]

Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one page business plan for you. Here's the link.

[Evan Ratliff]

But there was no link. There was no business plan. It's not his fault. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. My name is Evan Ratliff. I decided to create Kyle, my AI co founder after hearing a lot of stuff like this from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

[Noel]

There's this betting pool for the first year that there's a one person billion dollar company which would have been like unimaginable without AI. And now will happen.

[Evan Ratliff]

I got to thinking, could I be that one person? I'd made AI agents before for my award winning podcast Shell Game. This season on Shell Game, I'm trying to build a real company with a real product run by fake people.

[Podcast Announcer]

Oh, hey Evan, good to have you join us. I found some really interesting data on adoption rates for AI agents and small to medium businesses.

[Evan Ratliff]

Listen to Shell game on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Podcast Announcer]

On June 11, 1998, a deputy from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department went missing. It's an all out manhunt for John Awjay. Every search and rescue team in LA county has been called in to help. Within days, tips started flooding into the sheriff's department. The rumor around the drug scene was that a deputy was taken care of. Is this the story of a man who just got lost in the desert? Or of a cover up inside the nation's largest sheriff's department?

[Ben Bolan]

A homicide captain saying, detective, do not find out if this guy's guilty or innocent. Who does that?

[Podcast Announcer]

Valley of Shadows, a new series from Pushkin Industries about crime and corruption in California's high desert. Do you have any advice for us while looking into this disappearance?

[Noel]

I wouldn't do it alone.

[Podcast Announcer]

Listen to Valley of shadows on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Noel]

Hey everyone, it's Ed Helms and I'm Kalpen.

[Ben Bolan]

And we are the hosts of Irsay, The Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club.

[Noel]

This week on the podcast, I am talking to film and TV critic, radio and podcast host and Harry Potter super fan Rhianna Dillon to discuss Audible's full cast adaptation of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

[Ben Bolan]

What moments in this audiobook capture the feeling of the magical world best for you or just stood out the most?

[Noel]

I always loved reading about the Quidditch matches and. And I think the audio really gets it because it just plunges you right into the stands you have the crowd sounds like all around you is surround sound, especially if you're listening in headphones. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audio Book Club on the iHeartradio app.

[Ben Bolan]

Or wherever you get your podcast.

[Brad Palumbo]

The social media trend that's landing some gen zers in jail. The progressive media darling whose public meltdown got her fired.

[Ben Bolan]

I'm going to take Francesca off the network entirely.

[Brad Palumbo]

The massive TikTok boycott against Target. That makes no actual sense.

[Ben Bolan]

I will continue getting stuff from Target and I will continue to not pay for it.

[Brad Palumbo]

And the MAGA influencers whose trip to the White House ended in imperial embarrassment.

[Noel]

So refreshing to have a press secretary after the last few years who's both intelligent and articulate.

[Brad Palumbo]

You won't hear about these online stories in the mainstream media, but you can keep up with them and all the other entertaining and outrageous things happening online in media and in politics with the Brad vs. Everyone podcast hosted by me, Brad Palumbo. Every day of the week, I bring you on a wild ride through the most delulu takes on the Internet, criticizing the extremes of both sides from an independent perspective. Join in on the insanity and listen to the Brad vs. Everyone podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ben Bolan]

But we're right, you know, that this. 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?

[Noel]

They drank, probably.

[Ben Bolan]

They went to a bar.

[Noel]

Yeah, yeah, they had 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 grossly misogynistic. And of course it is. But there's an 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 was 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 annulment where she was just, you know, thrown out into the street with no property.

[Ben Bolan]

Right. 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. Leason and a few other authors. And they describe, in no uncertain terms specific situations where this occurs. There was a gentleman named Moses Maggs who we have a quote from in the course of attempting to sell his wife. And I'm not gonna do a voice, but it's written in that way, that kind of condescending way that authors of yesteryear would write whenever they thought someone 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 ax laugh to oppose your notice. Her's a good creature and goes pretty well in harness. With a little flogging, her can carry a hundred and a half of coals from the pit for three good mil. 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, who bids go in? Goin. Goin. I can't delay, as the auctioneer says. I can't dwell on this lot. Come say six shillings.

[Noel]

This is a horse you're talking about, right, Ben?

[Ben Bolan]

One would think. No, this is Moses Maggs selling his wife. She consented to be sold when they finished the transaction, she was sold for 6 shillings and 3 gallons of ale.

[Noel]

What was that part, though, about putting her in some sort of harness?

[Ben Bolan]

A halter. Yeah.

[Noel]

I don't understand. You're gonna have to help dissect this one for me a little bit, Ben. There's something about coal carrying loads.

[Ben Bolan]

It was talking about what that guy saw as the skills of his former spouse.

[Noel]

Geez Louise.

[Ben Bolan]

I know, 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 de jure, the legal way, was very, very difficult. But it wasn't the only de facto way to dissolve a marriage. You 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.

[Noel]

Sure.

[Ben Bolan]

So it's a bit confusing for us to understand how this practice of selling someone in a public space became, I don't know, not commonplace, but became a real thing.

[Noel]

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 consenting. Like you said, she consented to be sold.

[Ben Bolan]

Even though that got a bit more agency, at least.

[Noel]

Yeah, a little bit more agency. And in this article from Motherboard by Ben Richmond called why Wife Selling was Advantageous for Wives, that cites that same paper by Peter Leeson that you were talking about. And he makes the point that in the records of the nearing around 300 wives that were sold between 1780 and 1850, all signs point to almost every single one of them being consensual or the wife being all for it.

[Ben Bolan]

Yeah. And there's a great part. I'm glad you bring up this article because there's a great part of there where they talk about how the concept of marriage has evolved in 2019. 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 one another. They like each other. Right. However, that wasn't the case. That's relatively recent. Until about 200 years ago, marriage was thought of as much more of a transactional economic relationship.

[Noel]

Absolutely. Yeah.

[Ben Bolan]

So Justin EH 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 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. Yeah.

[Noel]

And if that's. What is that 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 too. God, it's terrible, you know, but here's the thing. In the. In the Motherboard article, Leeson goes on to point out something that I hadn't even considered. Who are the ones that are in the market for these, as he refers to them? Used wives.

[Ben Bolan]

Right. Or unhappy wives.

[Noel]

Yeah, exactly.

[Ben Bolan]

Who Is it?

[Noel]

Well, it's a couple of different possibilities. It could be folks who have just not. Who have been unlucky in love, you know, and just haven't done very well. A traditional kind of marriage marketplace. It could be 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 of the wives themselves.

[Ben Bolan]

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 that was organically created to get around the laws of the time. It is. Still, it's always gonna be a little bit puzzling because there were other avenues for de facto divorce. But Leeson and his team found that wife sales benefited wives rather than harmed them. And they argue that without this institution, at least some unhappy spouses in Industrial revolution era England would have remained trapped in inefficient marriages that they wanted to exit. I'm laughing at the phrase inefficient. And because it's weird to hear economists describe marriage, they weigh in on it in the following perspective. The way that we think of marriage from an economic perspective is to think about how much each of the spouses 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, 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 like them. Now instead of needing to, you know, end the blood feud between your clans or to get a dowry and so on.

[Noel]

What even is a dowry?

[Ben Bolan]

It's the payoff that the bride's family gives to the groom.

[Noel]

So it's just a cash offering, basically.

[Ben Bolan]

I think it could be a bartering 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.

[Noel]

But, you know, loophole that this thing was, 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 as social pariahs and it just wasn't done, you know what I mean? So the practice kind of went away. But apparently the Vintage News writes that they found a case as recently as 1913 when a woman said that her husband sold her to one of his work buddies for one pound. So that's obviously an outlier, but what an interesting practice and the whole idea that it was somehow better than the alternative for women.

[Ben Bolan]

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 du jour divorce. Also, the speeches from these people who are attempting to sell their spouses are so strange. For instance, there's one guy in 1832, I just want to list this off. He lists his spouse's 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 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 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.

[Noel]

It's a bad look.

[Ben Bolan]

It's not a good look.

[Noel]

Yeah, no, it's poor form.

[Ben Bolan]

It's a very poor form. And thankfully in this day and age, it is illegal.

[Noel]

Yeah, I mean, it was illegal back then, but the authorities seem perfectly willing to throw up, just turn a blind eye to it. Certainly would not be the case today. I think this would be highly frowned upon and you probably wouldn't be able to get away with it.

[Ben Bolan]

Yeah, it's human trafficking.

[Noel]

That's what.

[Ben Bolan]

That's the word, Ben.

[Noel]

That's the word.

[Ben Bolan]

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. Ridiculous historians, yeah.

[Noel]

If you want to check out me and my various adventures around town with my weird 10 year old, you can check me out Brionicinsider on Instagram.

[Ben Bolan]

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 benbolan@instagram. Thank you, super producer Casey Pegram. Thanks to our research associate, Eve Jeffcoat, who we really should have on the show at some point.

[Noel]

She's got some really cool stuff brewing. Thanks to Alex Williams, who composed the theme, and thanks to you, Ben Bolen, for being a pal in a, in a. In a cohort.

[Ben Bolan]

Likewise, Noel. Thank you. And luckily I did not find a comic book that pertained to today's topic that was worth recommending, which I think is a good sign for society overall.

[Noel]

Agreed. See you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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