Women were never considered to be property of their husbands in England. Property can be legally bought, sold, given away, inherited, destroyed, and seized in satisfaction of a judgment. It was never legal for English husbands to do any of these things to their wives. It wasn’t even possible for the husband to divorce his wife without a dispensation from the Pope (before the Reformation) or an Act of Parliament (after the Reformation).

There existed a social custom of “wife sale” among the English lower classes from the 17th century to the early 20th century, which served as a substitute for divorce for people who couldn’t afford an Act of Parliament, but this was always illegal; men who bought wives from their legal husbands could be prosecuted for it, and the children of a bought wife had no inheritance rights under the law. The custom had no more validity in law than human trafficking does today.

That is not, of course, to say that women were treated equally in English law; far from it. The legal doctrine of coverture, under which married women could not hold their own property or make contracts in their own right, was abolished by the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870. The spousal exception for rape, under which husbands could not be convicted of rape for forcing their wives to have sex with them, was not abolished until 1989 by the High Court of Justiciary, although of course it had always been legal to prosecute husbands for assault and battery when they committed rape or any other form of domestic violence. Women’s legal status in England before the 20th century was awful, but they were not property, as New World slaves were.