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.

    88/700 (page 58)
    wife with a rope round her neck, with the utmost cruelty, into the market-place at Dartmouth and sold her for two guineas. The plight of the woman, wTho had been married a year and a half, roused general sympathy; she suffered, too, under his brutal treatment. But her luck was in; she was bought by her first lover. The lowest price paid for a wife was threepence—in Nottingham, the same year. On occasions the custom of marriage by purchase was applied to men. Though very seldom, examples yet occurred up to the nineteenth century of the sale of husbands, which the courts severely reprimanded but could not forbid any more than in the case of women. A certain Margaret Collins complained before the Mayor of Drogheda that her husband was living with another woman. The husband submitted that his uncommonly strong and furious wife, who often bit him in her rage (and that, too, quite recently), had handed him over to another woman, his present wife, at a price, twopence being first offered and l^d. taken1. At that the plaintiff, in the presence of the whole court, leaped at the newly married couple and went for them tooth and nail until she was dragged off2. There is no need of lengthy argument to estimate rightly the coarseness and brutality which underlay the institution of marriage by purchase. The fact that it could last so long in England speaks clearly enough of itself. According to Finck, even in the lowest classes, the sellers frequently came in for rough handling, so that they were pelted with stones and mud; while for the wives, the horror of the proceedings was mitigated by the fact that in all accredited cases of this kind they were only too glad to be sold and thereby be freed from their tyrants. 1 Wives, it is to be noted, valued husbands at an even lower figure than husbands wives. 2 Jouy, loc. cit., Vol. II, pp. 321-322. [58]