wife selling

At that time, two types of wife selling were recognized, both considered illegal.

By 1568, wife selling was explicitly authorized by the law in several circumstances.

Another form of wife selling was by deed of conveyance.

The issue of the commonly perceived legitimacy of wife selling was also brought to the government.

For the average urban worker, wife selling is an affordable option when in 1998 China urban workers make approximately $60 a month.

Wife selling (English custom) partly occurred at Smithfield market, in ca.

Towards the end of the 18th century, some hostility towards wife selling began to manifest itself amongst the general population.

Finally, the less popular notion of wife selling was an alternative but illegitimate method of ending a marriage.

As the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, wife selling was prohibited and the government took measures to eradicate the practice.

He was a practical and knowledgeable judge with a fine judicial sense of humour (witness his pointed opinion in a case of wife selling).

During the famines caused by the Great Leap Forward, wife selling occurred in many of the poorer areas.

Wife selling occurred in Europe in addition to that in Britain:

Some of the new couples bigamously married, but the attitude of officialdom towards wife selling was equivocal.

Wife selling (English custom)

During the Ming Dynasty, it was gradually established that only wife selling which was motivated by adultery should be punished.

A Christian Biblical Old Testament passage describes an event in Egypt as an instance of wife selling.

The English custom of wife selling spread to Wales, Scotland, Australia, and the United States before dying out in the early 20th century.

Authorized wife selling was preserved by Qing Dynasty lawmakers, as was the prohibition against selling a wife to her lover.

Spurred by alcohol, he decides to wife selling and baby daughter, Elizabeth-Jane, to a sailor, Mr. Newson, for five Guinea (British coin).

In his account, Wives for Sale, author Samuel Pyeatt Menefee collected 387 incidents of wife selling, the last of which occurred in the early 20th century.

JPs in Quarter Sessions became more active in punishing those involved in wife selling, and some test cases in the central law courts confirmed the illegality of the practice.

Wife selling appears to have been widespread throughout England, but relatively rare in neighbouring Wales, where only a few cases were reported, and in Scotland where only one has been discovered.

Wife selling persisted in England in some form until the early 20th century; according to the jurist and historian James Bryce, writing in 1901, wife sales were still occasionally taking place during his time.

Newspaper accounts were often disparaging: "a most disgusting and disgraceful scene" was the description in a report of 1832, but it was not until the 1840s that the number of cases of wife selling began to decline significantly.

Wife selling included the practice of a husband selling his wife, in some cases to a new husband, in effect creating a divorce, and included sales by parties outside of the marriages, such as with sales by slave-masters.