HENRY FROST

There is no myth relative to the manners and customs of the English that in my experience is more tenaciously held by the ordinary Frenchman, than that the sale of a wife in the market-place is an habitual and an accepted fact in English life.

It is—so far as my experience goes—quite useless to assure a Frenchman that such transfer of wives is not a matter of every-day occurrence and is not legal; he replies, with an expression of incredulity, that of course English people endeavour to make light of, or deny a fact that is “notorious.”

In a book by the antiquary Colin de Plancy, on Legends and Superstitions connected with the Sacraments, he gives up some pages to an account of the prevalent English custom.

When I was in France a few years ago, in a town church in the south, I heard an abbÉ once preach on marriage, and contrast its indissolubility in Catholic France with the laxity in Protestant England, where “any one, when tired of his wife, puts a halter round her neck, takes her to the next market town and sells her for what she will fetch.” I ventured to call on this abbÉ and remonstrate, but he answered me he had seen the fact stated in books of the highest authority, and that my disputing the statement did not prove that his authorities were wrong, but that my experience was limited, and he asked me point-blank whether I had never known such cases. There, unhappily, he had me on the hip. And when I was obliged to confess that I did know of one such case, “Mais, voilÀ, mon Dieu,” said he, and shrugged his shoulders with a triumphant smile.

Now it must be allowed that such sales have taken place, and that this is so is due to rooted conviction in the rustic mind that such a transaction is legal and morally permissible.

The case I knew was this.

There lived a tall, thin man in the parish when I was a boy, who was the village poet. Whenever an event of any consequence took place within the confines of the parish, such as the marriage of the squire’s daughter, he came down to the manor-house with a copy of verses he had composed on the occasion, and was then given his dinner and a crown. Now this man had actually bought his wife for half-a-crown. Her husband had led her into Okehampton and had sold her there in the market. The poet purchased her for half the sum he had received for one of his poems, and led her home with him, a distance of twelve miles, by the halter, he holding it in his hand, she placidly, contentedly, wearing the loop about her neck.

The report that Henry Frost was leading home his half-crown wife preceded the arrival of the couple, and when they entered the village all the inhabitants turned out to see the spectacle.

Now this arrangement was not very satisfactory to either squire or rector, and both intervened. Henry Frost maintained that Anne was his legitimate wife, for “he had not only bought her in the market, but had led her home, with the halter in his hand, and he’d take his Bible oath that he never took the halter off her till she had crossed his doorstep and he had shut the door.”

The parson took down the Bible, the squire “Burn’s Justice of Peace,” and strove to convince Harry that his conduct was warranted by neither Scripture nor the law of the land. “I don’t care,” he said, “her’s my wife, as sure as if we was spliced at the altar, for and because I paid half-a-crown, and I never took off the halter till her was in my house; lor’ bless yer honours, you may ask any one if that ain’t marriage, good, sound, and Christian, and every one will tell you it is.”

Mr. Henry Frost lived in a cottage that was on lives, so the squire was unable to bring compulsion to bear on him.

When I call the man Frost, I am not employing his real name, because his relatives are alive, and I know them very well.

Frost, as already intimated, was village bard or poet. I remember well his coming down to the house with a poem on a transaction of my father’s, the advisability of which I now greatly doubt.

In our village, the “revel” was kept up every year on the first Sunday after Trinity Sunday, and the week following. A revel in Devonshire is the equivalent of the wake in other parts of England, and of the feast in Cornwall. It used to be celebrated on the day of the saint to whom the parish church is dedicated. But when the new style came into use, the conservative rustic mind resisted the change and adhered to the computation according to the unrevised calendar. Accordingly, in most places the feast or revel is eleven days after the day of the patron saint. In some places, however, it is movable. Now our church is dedicated to St. Peter, accordingly our revel ought to be on the nearest Sunday after June 29. It is rare indeed that the first Sunday after Trinity should fall so late, and impossible, I believe, that it could synchronise with old-style St. Peter’s Day. In 1899 the first Sunday after Trinity was on June 4—twenty-five days before new-style St. Peter’s Day, and thirty-six before the feast reckoned by the old style.

There is, however, some reason to believe that the earlier dedication was to St. Petrock, whose day is June 4, and that the title of the church was altered in 1261, when reconsecrated. The bishops of Exeter always endeavoured to get rid of the patron saints when belonging to the Celtic Church, and substitute for them some who were in the Roman calendar.

The revel at Lew Trenchard agreed much more closely with St. Petrock’s Day than with that of St. Peter the Apostle.

However, this is neither here nor there. The revel was kept up with shows, a fair, and horse-races, and it must be allowed there was some drunkenness.

My father, as squire, and in those days an autocrat, disapproved of the revel and abolished it, and substituted for it a cottage garden show, on no very determined date. The revel has never recovered, and the flower show, after living for two years, died a natural death.

I do not myself believe in the destruction of any ancient institution. Let it be reformed, but never abolished.

Well, now to the point.

Henry Frost appeared on the occasion of the first flower show with a poem composed to celebrate the birth of the cottage garden exhibition and the burial of the revel. It was very laudatory of my father, and every verse concluded with the refrain—

He had used incredible effort to obtain suitable rhymes. In one verse he had—

Another ran—

Another, in doubtful grammar, ran—

“Ah,” said my father, “all Henry Frost thinks of in his innermost mind is that I should have a most expansive pocket, and that he may be able to get drunk on what he draws from it in reward for his poem.”

When Anne died, then a difficulty arose: under what name was she to be entered in the register? The parson insisted that he could not and he would not enter her as Anne Frost, for that was not her legal name. Then Henry was angry, and carried her off to be buried in another parish, where the parson was unacquainted with the circumstances. I must say that Anne proved an excellent “wife.” She was thrifty, clean, and managed a rough-tempered and rough-tongued man with great tact, and was generally respected. She died in or about 1843.

Much later than that there lived a publican some miles off, whom I knew very well; indeed he was the namesake of and first cousin to a carpenter in my constant employ. He bought his wife for a stone two-gallon jar of Plymouth gin, if I was informed aright. She had belonged to a stonecutter, but as he was dissatisfied with her, he put up a written notice in several public places to this effect—

In this case also I do not give the names, as the woman is, I believe, still alive. I believe—as I was told—that the foreman of the works remonstrated, and insisted that such a sale would be illegal. He was not, however, clear as to the points of law, and he asserted that it would be illegal unless the husband held an auctioneer’s license, and if money passed. This was rather a damper. However, the husband was very desirous to be freed from his wife, and he held the sale as he had advertised, making the woman stand on a table, and he armed himself with a little hammer. The biddings were to be in kind and not in money. One man offered a coat, but as he was a small man and the seller was stout, when he found that the coat would not fit him he refused it. Another offered a “phisgie,” i.e. a pick, but this also was refused, as the husband possessed a “phisgie” of his own. Finally the landlord offered a two-gallon jar of gin, and down fell the hammer with “gone.”

I knew the woman; she was not bad looking. The new husband drank, and treated her very roughly, and on one occasion when I was lunching at the inn she had a black eye. I asked her how she had hurt herself. She replied that she had knocked her face against the door, but I was told that this was a result of a domestic brawl. Now, the remarkable feature in these cases is that it is impossible to drive the idea out of the heads of those who thus deal in wives that such a transaction is not sanctioned by law and religion. In a parish register in my neighbourhood is the following entry—

In this instance there is no evidence of a sale, but we may be sure that money did pass and that the contractor of the new marriage believed it was a right and proper union, although perhaps irregular; and the first wife unquestionably believed that she was acting in observance of a legal right in transferring her husband to her sister. There are instances in which country people have gone before a local solicitor and have had a contract of sale drawn up for the disposal of their wives. The Birmingham police court in 1853 had to adjudicate on such a case, and the astounding thing in this instance was that a lawyer could be found to draw up the contract. It is no wonder that the magistrates administered a very severe reprimand. But there was a far earlier case than this—that of Sir William de Paganel. The lady stoutly and indignantly resisted the transfer, and appealed against the contract to the law, which declared the sale to be null and void.

In 1815 a man held a regular auction in the market-place at Pontefract, offering his wife at a minimum bidding of one shilling, but he managed to excite a competition, and she was finally knocked down for eleven shillings.

In 1820 a man named Brouchet led his wife, a decent, pleasant-looking woman, but with a tongue in her mouth, into the cattle-market at Canterbury from the neighbouring village of Broughton. He required a salesman to dispose of her, but the salesman replied that his dealings were with cattle only, and not with women. Brouchet, not to be beaten, thereupon hired a cattle-pen, paying sixpence for the hire, and led his wife into it by the halter that was round her neck. She did not fetch a high figure, being disposed of to a young man of Canterbury for five shillings.

In 1832, on 7th April, a farmer named Joseph Thomson came into Carlisle with his wife, to whom he had been married three years before; he sent the bellman round the town to announce a sale, and this attracted a great crowd. At noon the sale took place. Thomson placed his wife on a chair, with a rope of straw round her neck. He then said—according to the report in the “Annual Register,”—“Gentlemen, I have to offer to your notice, my wife, Mary Anne Thomson, otherwise Williams, whom I mean to sell to the highest and fairest bidder. Gentlemen, it is her wish as well as mine to part for ever. She has been to me only a born serpent. I took her for my comfort, and the good of my home; but she became my tormentor, a domestic curse. Gentlemen, I speak the truth from my heart when I say—may God deliver us from troublesome wives and frolicsome women! Avoid them as you would a mad dog, or a roaring lion, a loaded pistol, cholera morbus, Mount Etna, or any other pestilential thing in nature. Now I have shown you the dark side of my wife, and told you her faults and failings, I will introduce the bright and sunny side of her, and explain her qualifications and goodness. She can read novels and milk cows; she can laugh and weep with the same ease that you could take a glass of ale when thirsty. Indeed, gentlemen, she reminds me of what the poet says of women in general—

She can make butter and scold the maid; she can sing Moore’s melodies, and plait her frills and caps; she cannot make rum, gin, or whisky, but she is a good judge of the quality from long experience in tasting them. I therefore offer her with all her perfections and imperfections for the sum of fifty shillings.”

That this sermon was spoken by Thomson is most improbable—it is doubtless put into his mouth by the editor of the “Annual Register”; it was not to his interest to depreciate the article he desired to sell. After about an hour the woman was knocked down to one Henry Mears, for twenty shillings and a Newfoundland dog. They then parted company in perfect good-humour, each satisfied with his bargain; Mears and the woman went one way, and Thomson and the dog another.

In 1835 a man led his wife by a halter, in precisely the same way, into the market at Birmingham, and sold her for fifteen pounds. She at once went home with the purchaser. She survived both buyer and seller, and then married again. Some property came to her in the course of years from her first husband; for notwithstanding claims put forth by his relatives she was able to maintain in a court of law that the sale did not and could not vitiate her rights as his widow.

Much astonishment was caused in 1837 in the West Riding of Yorkshire by a man being committed to prison for a month with hard labour for selling or attempting to sell his wife by auction in the manner already described. It was generally and firmly believed that he was acting within his rights.

In 1858, in a tavern at Little Horton, near Bradford, a man named Hartley Thomson put up his wife, who is described by the local journals as a pretty young woman, for sale by auction, and he had the sale previously announced by sending round the bellman. He led her into the market with a ribbon round her neck, which exhibits an advance in refinement over the straw halter; and again in 1859, a man at Dudley disposed of his wife in a somewhat similar manner for sixpence. A feature in all these instances is the docility with which the wife submits to be haltered and sold. She would seem to have been equally imbued with the idea that there was nothing to be ashamed of in the transaction, and that it was perfectly legal.

If we look to see whence originated the idea, we shall probably find it in the conception of marriage as a purchase. Among savage races, the candidate for marriage is expected to pay the father for his daughter. A marriageable girl is worth so many cows or so many reindeer. The man pays over a sum of money or its equivalent to the father, and in exchange receives the girl. If he desires to be separated from her he has no idea of giving her away, but receives what is calculated to be her market value from the man who is disposed to relieve him of her. In all dealings for cattle, or horses, or sheep, a handsel is paid, half-a-crown to clinch the bargain, and the transfer of coin constitutes a legal transfer of authority and property over the animal. This is applied to a woman, and when a coin, even a sixpence, is paid over and received, the receiver regards this as releasing him from all further possession of the wife, who at once passes under the hand of the purchaser. There is probably no trace in our laws of women having been thus regarded as negotiable properties, but it is unquestionable that at an early period, before Christianity invaded the island, such a view was held, and if here and there the rustic mind is unable to rise to a higher view of the marriage state, it shows how extremely slow it is for opinions to alter when education has been neglected.