May
11
/ 2022
The year was 1832 when Joseph Thompson, a local Cardiff man, led his wife by halter to the local marketplace hoping for a good price in what was, after all, just a wife auction. Before the bidding, Thompson, whose asking price was a hefty 50 shillings, explained the reasons he was selling his wife in a wife auction: “She has been to me only a bosom serpent. I took her for my comfort, and the good of my house, but she became my tormentor, a domestic curse, a night invasion, and a daily devil…” The first recorded case of wife-selling was in 1553 AD. However, some historians have maintained that the practice was much older and of Anglo-Saxon origin, starting
