A history of English sexual morals / by Ivan Bloch ; translated by William H. Forstern.

  • Iwan Bloch
Date:
1936
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A history of English sexual morals / by Ivan Bloch ; translated by William H. Forstern. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    85/700 (page 55)
    husbands sold their wives; fathers sold their daughters more seldom than in earlier days. The conduct of such sales was the roughest imaginable and most humiliating for the unfortunate woman. Commonly the husband led his wife with a rope round her neck, on a market day, to the place where cattle were sold, bound her to a post and sold her to the highest bidder in the presence of the necessary witnesses. Some quite lowly official, often the husband himself, fixed the price, seldom more than a few shillings; then he untied her and led her round the market place by the rope1. The people called this kind of sale ' the horn market \ The purchasers were usually widowers and bachelors. The woman became by such sale the authentic mate of the purchaser, and her children by him were looked upon as legitimate. Sometimes the new husband followed this purchase by a wedding in church. Thus a lord, for example, who had seduced the wife of a servant, bought her formally from the husband and after- wards married her. The law allowed such marriages, which were regarded as legal. Women were offered for sale, too, in the newspapers. The following advertisement appeared in a Dublin paper in May 1791: 'A bargain to be sold.' This was an expression which implied in Ireland the sale of a woman2. The ordinary place in London where these sales of women were held was Smithfield Market, where, too, as has been pointed out, the cattle market was held. In The Times of 22nd July 1797 the following notice occurs: 8 By an oversight in the report on Smithfield Market we are not in a position to quote this week the price of women. The increasing value of the fairer sex is considered by various celebrated writers to be a 1 Cf. Jouy, loc. cit., Vol. II, pp. 317-319. Chapter ' Vente de Femmes a Lon<Ires '. Pp. 317-324. With a vignette showing such a sale-scene, in which the rope is to be seen. Aivhenholtz, Annals, Vol. VII, p. 177. [55]