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Further research found that wife-selling occurred more often in Britain than I had imagined. It was most prevalent among the lower classes, where the cost of a Parliamentary divorce was prohibitive, and, for reasons unclear to me, primarily concentrated in areas of Cornwall and Devon. Lawrence Stone in his book Road To Divorce reports the numbers of recorded wife sales grew from two per decade in the mid 18th century to fifty per decade in the 1820s and 1830s. After 1840, the number of cases dropped considerably.
  There were certain rituals involved in a wife sale. They were public affairs, usually taking place during market days. There was usually a pre-arranged buyer, someone the wife already knew and with whom she may already be involved. The sale itself was handled like any livestock sale, with the wife led to market in a halter. By the late 18th century, it became common practice to include a deed of sale, transferring all obligations of support to the purchaser. These deeds were not legal, but helped reinforce the public nature of the ritual.
After I had written the opening scene of the auction, I came across the print, above left, showing exactly what I had envisioned, with the wife perched on a platform, above the other "livestock", with a halter around her neck. This is a French print from about 1820, poking fun at the perceived mercenary nature of the British. More recently, I discovered the print by Thomas Rowlandson, above right, titled "Selling a Wife" from c.1812, which shows a similar scene of a haltered woman being sold at auction.
When deciding on the setting for The Bride Sale I knew I needed someplace that would look very different to the heroine than the lush, green countryside where she'd grown up. The granite moorland of mid-Cornwall seemed most appropriate. I always try to find real houses to use as inspiration, if not true models, for any house used in my stories. I wanted the hero's house in Cornwall to look as forbidding to the heroine as he did. I settled on Cotehele, an Elizabethan house on the eastern border of Cornwall, as my model. I visited the house on a bleak day in late November, exactly the time of the book's opening (below, the exterior photos). The house was not open for visitors but I got to wander the grounds and all about the exterior. The Great Hall was being decorated for Christmas by some of the gardening staff. They were hanging huge boughs made of Cotehele greenery and dried flowers that would drape in deep swags from each corner of the room to the center. The staff kindly let me step into the Great Hall briefly and watch their work (below, the interior photo).
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