متى إشتهرت ظاهرة بيع الزوجات في إنجلترا  ؟
Wife selling in its "ritual form" appears to be an "invented custom" that originated at about the end of the 17th century, although there is an account from 1302 of someone who "granted his wife by deed to another man". With the rise in popularity of newspapers, reports of the practice become more frequent in the second half of the 18th century. In the words of 20th-century writer Courtney Kenny, the ritual was "a custom rooted sufficiently deeply to show that it was of no recent origin". Writing in 1901 on the subject of wife selling, James Bryce stated that there was "no trace at all in our [English] law of any such right", but he also observed that "everybody has heard of the odd habit of selling a wife, which still occasionally recurs among the humbler classes in England".
second half of the 18th century