The Yorkshire Almanac 2025

Excerpt

On May 19th, a wife was sold in Leeds market for five guineas, to a gentleman who well knew her merits. Strange to say, she had been previously sold at the same place before she was born, her mother, when she was in embryo, being disposed of in a similar manner.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Abbreviations

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Context required. Divorce/prostitution?

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Original

On May 19th, a wife was sold in Leeds market for five guineas, to a gentleman who well knew her merits, and, strange to say, she had been previously sold at the same place before she was born, her mother, when she was in embryo, being disposed of in a similar manner.

54 words.

Tags

Tags are assigned inclusively on the basis of an entry’s original text and any comment. You may find this confusing if you only read an entry excerpt.

• 📌Bradford (73) ·
• Divorce (2) ·
• 📌Leeds (247) ·
• Misogyny (9) ·
• Newspaper (28) ·
• Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser (1837-52) (3), Chartist newspaper owned and run by Feargus O'Connor ·
• Slavery (22) ·
• Wife selling (2), an illegal but often tolerated way of ending an unsatisfactory marriage without going to the expense of divorce, practised from the late 17th to the late 19th century - see e.g. Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge ·

All tags.

Similar

21 April 1838: The Northern Star reminds husbands that it is a criminal offence to sell one’s wife

29 September 1830: Tory Radical Richard Oastler: “free” white workers in the Bradford mills are worse off than their enslaved black counterparts in the colonies

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23 April 1832: “Pilgrims” arrive at Leeds on Easter Monday on their way to York to hear Richard Oastler call for a 10-hour working day for mill children

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