Wife Selling in Victorian England Remember the show wife swap? Well, that was basically Victorian England. Even now in some communities and religions, divorce is looked down upon as unsavoury, or wrong, and great lengths are taken to avoid it. So go back a few hundred years and add on the British sense of propriety, traditional values and the belief that women were property and you can imagine the pearl-clutching that suggesting divorce would induce (unless, you know, you were the King of England or something). Referencing Henry VIII here. Traipsing your wife around like a side of beef, however, was totally fine. Women sold as possessions at market places was a practice that began in the 17th century and persisted right through the Victorian era till approximately the early 1900s, with the last recorded instance occurring in 1913.