d reasonable idea naturally tended to
persist even after the growth of civilization rendered force a much less
decisive factor in social life. In England in Queen Elizabeth's time no
woman must be masterless, although the feminine subjects of Queen
Elizabeth had in their sovereign the object lesson of a woman who could
play a very brilliant and effective part in life and yet remain absolutely
masterless. Still later, in the eighteenth century, even so fine a
moralist as Shaftesbury, in his _Characteristics_, refers to lovers of
married women as invaders of property. If such conceptions still ruled
even in the best minds, it is not surprising that in the same century,
even in the following century, they were carried out into practice by less
educated people who frankly bought and sold women.

Schrader, in his _Reallexicon_ (art. "Brautkauf"), points out
that, originally, the purchase of a wife was the purchase of her
person, and not merely of the right of protecting her. The
original conception probably persisted long in Great Britain on
account of its remoteness from the centres of civilization. In
the eleventh century Gregory VII desired Lanfranc to stop the
sale of wives in Scotland and elsewhere in the island of the
English (Pike, _History of Crime in England_, vol. i, p. 99). The
practice never quite died out, however, in remote country
districts.

Such transactions have taken place even in London. Thus in the
_Annual Register_ for 1767 (p. 99) we read: "About three weeks
ago a bricklayer's laborer at Marylebone sold a woman, whom he
had cohabited with for several years, to a fellow-workman for a
quarter guinea and a gallon of beer. The workman went off with
the purchase, and she has since had the good fortune to have a
legacy of L200, and some plate, left her by a deceased uncle in
Devonshire. The parties were married last Friday."

The Rev. J. Edward Vaux (_Church Folk-lore_, second edition, p.
146) narrates two authentic cases in which women had been bought
by their husbands in open market in the nineteenth century. In
one case the wife, with her own full consent, was brought to
market with a halter round her neck, sold for half a crown, and
led to her new home, twelve miles off by the new husband who had
purchased her; in the other case a publican bought another man's
wife for a two-gallon jar of gin.