Land conflict between the manor and the peasants

Land conflict between the manor and the peasants is a struggle over who may use, control, and benefit from the fields, pastures, and forest surrounding Lipce. It begins in disputes over practical access and the insecurity of small holdings, then intensifies when the manor sells timber from Wolf’s Hollow. The villagers’ resistance draws on claims of customary use and communal need, but legal appeals, poverty, and unequal power make solidarity difficult to sustain.

Scarcity, property, and unequal power

The conflict is rooted in a village where land is limited and unequally distributed. In a conversation among younger farmers, the blacksmith contrasts their daily toil and dependence on powerful masters with the greater resources of the Squire, said to possess more land than two villages together. He warns that there may soon be too little land for each household to have a field. The grievance is not simply that some own more than others: land determines whether a family can live independently, and the fear of losing access makes each contested strip consequential.

The villagers’ arguments about ownership do not always take the form of a settled legal claim. One dispute concerns pasture that a speaker insists is theirs and clearly recorded in the register, yet users are repeatedly driven away and told that the land belongs to someone else. A cow has died after being chased, and another boy has been beaten during the same confrontation. The proposed response is to take the matter to court or the commissioner, but the loss is already material: the cow is valued at three hundred zlotys. The incident shows how an apparently specific boundary dispute becomes a question of whose account of property will be enforced, and at whose cost.

Maciej Boryna’s view of land combines personal possession with a broader claim against the manor. As he rides through the forest, he counts four morgen as his and adds the one morgen belonging to Jagusia. He believes the Lord will not allow the villagers to be wronged, but also insists that they will not simply submit. His calculation joins household property to collective grievance: the threatened forest matters as a resource, but also as a landscape through which the villagers understand their rights and place.

Wolf’s Hollow and the turn to resistance

The sale of the wood at Wolf’s Hollow makes the conflict immediate. When news reaches a gathering in the inn, Maciej Boryna reacts by smashing a bottle and denouncing the sale. He insists that the villagers will not allow the timber to be taken, and the company stays late into the night discussing the manor and making threats. The sale changes the dispute from a continuing complaint into an anticipated confrontation over whether the manor can carry out its decision on the ground.

At a later public appeal, Antek Boryna frames the felling as the latest in a sequence of injuries: the manor is cutting the villagers’ forest, refusing them work, and driving them toward ruin. He recalls complaints and court proceedings that, in his account, have failed to bring redress. The crowd answers with calls to chase off the workers and stop the felling. His speech binds together several kinds of grievance—access to woodland, the futility of formal appeals, and the villagers’ lack of protection—so the forest becomes a visible test of whether their claims have any force.

When the villagers reach the clearing, people arrive by sleigh, cart, horse, and on foot. Some carry sticks, pitchforks, or flails; others have a scythe or a branch, while the women rush forward with cries and bare hands. They tell the woodcutters to leave because the forest is theirs. Maciej Boryna leads the charge, and the assembled crowd confronts the workers directly. The scene turns a claim about rights into collective physical action; it also exposes the danger of a dispute in which neither the villagers’ assertion nor the manor’s sale has been resolved through an accepted agreement.

The cost of exclusion

The timber dispute is also a labor dispute. At least twenty hired hands in Lipce are described as desperately needing work. Winter has brought snow and frost, some potatoes have frozen, and families have little money; some people already eat a hot meal only once a day and go to bed hungry. They had expected the felling at Wolf’s Hollow to provide employment, but the Squire has reportedly decided not to hire a single man from Lipce, angered by a complaint lodged against him with the commissioner. Thus a conflict fought in the name of communal forest rights threatens the immediate livelihood of villagers who need wages from the very work being contested.

This tension prevents the villagers from forming a simple unity of interest. Maciej Boryna says he signed the complaint and will stand by it, refusing to let the firs be cut until the manor reaches an agreement and gives the villagers what he says is theirs. His resolve may protect the collective claim, but the poor face the short-term cost of lost employment. The narrative does not treat resistance as a cost-free expression of solidarity: the same decision can defend a shared resource and deepen hunger among those with no land or savings to fall back on.

A later account of village poverty makes that divide still clearer. A sick young woman is found in a freezing cottage where the windows are stuffed with straw; the household has run out of potatoes and sold its quilt. Another woman gives birth while ill, without money or adequate help, as fields stand fallow because men are imprisoned. The account links the land conflict and the absence of work to a wider crisis of subsistence, without suggesting that every poor household’s hardship has a single cause. It also condemns the comfort of better-off farmers who, though they live nearby, fail to concern themselves with their poorer neighbors and leave their suffering to divine providence.

Collective action beyond the forest

The villagers’ response to the proposed purchase of Podlesie by German settlers echoes the tactics developed around the forest. Rather than acting separately, they are urged to approach the prospective buyers together and peacefully, telling them not to buy. If the buyers proceed, the villagers propose refusing to let them sow or build and staying on the fields themselves. The threatened pressure is collective and practical: deny a new owner the ability to establish control through cultivation and construction. This episode extends the land conflict from the manor’s woodland to the future ownership of an estate, while showing how shared action can be imagined as negotiation, obstruction, or both.

Across these disputes, land is never only acreage or timber. It is a basis for household survival, a source of work, and the ground on which local authority is tested. The villagers appeal to registers, courts, and commissioners, yet their experience leaves them doubtful that formal procedures can make powerful owners answerable. They also turn to public meetings and coordinated resistance, but poverty divides those who can endure a long struggle from those who need immediate wages and food. The conflict therefore reveals both the strength and the limits of the community’s claim: people can gather around a threatened resource, but agreement about justice does not erase differences in who can afford to fight for it.