Divorce?
• Wife selling – did it really happen? Thomas Hardy’s classic, “The Mayor of Casterbridge”, is a tale about a wife being sold and the unhappy consequences of that action. Yes, it happened. The sale in Hardy’s book took place at a fair, but such sales could have been anywhere where things were bought and sold – so at a market or beside the local Cross. • I’ve found a marriage for the right people but they should have been married during the Commonwealth Period. It must be a mistake. No, not necessarily. During the Commonwealth Period following the English Civil War marriages weren’t supposed to take place in the church. So there are gaps in the parish registers for this period. It is quite possible that the couple had actually married but it wasn’t written in the parish register until after the Restoration of the King.
