Wife Sales

Great article from Katherine Mangu-Ward at Reason about a recent paper related to wife sales in 18th and 19th century England.  While the paper is directed to the economics of this practice, there are some tantalizing quotes and references that indicate the existence of original source material.  Moreover, since these appear to have involved at least some public auctions (see below quote), it seems likely that such sources exist.  Further information available here!


"“Let be, yer rogue. I wull be sold. I wants a change.”"
—  
         Mattie, an unhappy wife, to her husband, c. 1830.1

Using Industrial Revolution Home Inventories

From Boston.com:

On the eve of their marriage in 1682, Hans Hürning and Barbara Herrenmann, like all German couples of their time, invited a local official into each of their homes to catalog every single one of their possessions.  

Three hundred years after Hans and Barbara made their lists, a graduate student named Sheilagh Ogilvie began searching through the archives of central German villages for a dissertation topic. In every town she visited there would inevitably be reams of such lists, and she was shocked to find how pervasive and untouched these household inventories were. They had been produced by the local municipalities at marriage and death from at least the 17th century onwards, and in many cases nobody had looked at them for centuries: The sand used by scribes to blot the ink just after writing would often fall out onto her lap.

At the time, there were simply too many for her to try to research. But three years ago, armed with computing capabilities that did not exist in the 1980s, Ogilvie — now a professor at the University of Cambridge — began an ambitious project to process every one of the thousands of lists from two towns in the Württemberg region, beginning with the year 1602 and up until the late 1800s.

 Never forget to look for direct sources that may not be immediately available!