Skills of the unskilled: working with livestock in medieval Northern Europe

Great strides have been made in the study of labour in pre-industrial Europe, with growing recognition that unpaid work by women and children was socially and economically crucial. However, certain aspects of rural society are still neglected, particularly work with livestock in extensive pastoral regions. This article investigates who looked after cattle, sheep and goats in medieval northern Europe, focusing on Ireland and Sweden. Often it is assumed that rural societies only became flexible about gender and status roles when external factors (post-Black Death labour shortages or early modern market demands) forced them to. This article demonstrates a longer history of flexibility around work in pastoral regions. Women of different status were not only milking dairy animals; they were also, along with men, herding livestock in uplands and woodlands. Furthermore, dairying and herding required subtle landscape knowledge and skill in reading animal behaviour, raising questions about how useful the term ‘unskilled labour’ is. This pre-existing flexibility and savoir-faire forces us to reconsider the agency of ‘peripheral’ pastoral societies in the emergence of agrarian capitalism. Instead of simply responding to growing demands for dairy, meat and wool, such societies may have been ideally placed to tap into and fuel these markets.