Dairy Maid’s Yoke

This wooden object is a yoke, most likely used for carrying pails of milk. It came from Thompson’s Farm in Long Crendon. The previous owners were Mr and Mrs Gettley.

Cows would have been milked in the fields or barns by hand and then the pails carried by yoke to the dairy, usually by milk maids or even children. The museum yoke is probably Victorian but versions of yokes have been used for centuries to enable the carrying of heavy loads.

Yokes were also used by milk sellers delivering milk to houses and shops in the streets. They would have been a familiar sight in towns in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The drawing of a milk maid carrying a yoke on the previous page is a rather romanticised depiction but shows an example of the pails with measuring jugs hooked ready for dispensing quantities of milk to customers.

Two full pails of milk could have weighed well over 20kg, a very heavy load. For comparison today a 2 litre container of milk weighs around 2kg.