Villagers’ claim to four morgs of timber per half-włóka

Villagers’ claim to four morgs of timber per half-włóka is a customary-rights argument at the center of Lipce’s conflict with the manor over forest use. The villagers treat the timber as something owed to them, not a discretionary gift; the manor’s refusal to recognize their claim turns an argument over the amount of wood into a dispute over livelihood, authority, and who may speak for the community. The claim is never settled by a clearly accepted rule: villagers cite their understanding of what is due, while the squire’s offer and the prospect of official judgment expose how contested that understanding remains.

Basis of the Claim

The claim has a concrete measure: villagers argue that four morgs of timber are owed for every half-włóka. When the squire offers two morgs apiece, that proposal is rejected as inadequate. Bartek explains that the Prefect had also advised against accepting two, reinforcing the villagers’ sense that their demand is not simply a refusal to compromise but a claim with support beyond their own immediate circle. Yet the disagreement remains unresolved in the village discussion: Grzela Rakoski counters that whether the timber is owed is not clear and should be settled by officials. The argument thus rests on a customary entitlement that villagers consider real, but whose formal recognition they cannot take for granted.

Boryna’s own understanding gives the claim a household scale. As he rides through the forest, he reckons that four morgen belong to him and one to Jagusia, mentally adding their shares while surveying the trees. The forest is at once a landscape and an account of what is due: he recognizes particular trees as potential timber and measures the woodland through the shares he believes his household should receive. His confidence that the villagers must not allow themselves to be wronged links the claim to a broader struggle over the manor’s power to decide what counts as theirs.

The dispute over timber also echoes an earlier quarrel over pasture. A villager says the pasture is theirs, citing the register, while complaining that they are repeatedly driven off and that others claim the land. In the same exchange, the death of a cow is attributed to the exhausting chase from the grazing ground, and the loss is valued at three hundred zlotys. That episode makes the consequences of contested access immediate: disputed rights are not merely a matter of wording or boundaries, but can cost villagers animals, money, and the use of land on which their households depend.

From Customary Right to Collective Resistance

The claim sharpens when Boryna learns that a council about the forest has been held without him. He takes the exclusion as a personal insult and suspects the Miller, the Voyt, the blacksmith, and the Squire of acting against the people. His anger does not remain only a private grievance, however. He insists that he signed the complaint against the Squire and will stand by it; until there is an agreement and the villagers receive what is theirs, he says, not a single fir should be cut. The claim therefore supplies a condition for action: logging is to stop until the dispute is addressed.

The demand has economic stakes beyond the value of timber itself. Boryna is told that at least twenty hired hands in Lipce desperately need work. The winter is severe, some villagers’ potatoes have frozen, and people already face days when they eat a hot meal only once and go to bed hungry. They had expected the felling at Wolf’s Hollow to provide employment; instead, the Squire has reportedly resolved to hire no one from Lipce, angered by the complaint made against him to the Prefect. The village’s assertion of a right to the forest is thus entangled with a demand for access to work: the same decision that denies timber also threatens income during the hardest part of the year.

At a meeting of young men, the dispute is framed as both an inheritance grievance and a failure of village management. Grzela Rakoski says it is unjust for older people to hold on to land without allowing their children a share, but argues that mishandling the forest question is worse: had the villagers reached an agreement with the Squire, the matter might already have been finished. Others answer that two morgs are too little beside the four they say are owed per half-włóka. The exchange reveals an internal tension in the claim: collective resistance may defend a shared entitlement, while disagreement about negotiation and the control of land continues within Lipce itself.

Public Defense and Wider Meaning

When the villagers gather against the woodcutters, Boryna places their forest claim before the crowd as part of a record of accumulated injuries. He invokes the manor’s felling of their forest, its refusal to employ them, and the repeated harassment and ruin villagers have suffered. The crowd answers with calls to drive the workers away and stop the cutting. As people from Lipce arrive at the clearing—men and youths carrying sticks, pitchforks, flails, or branches, and women joining with cries and their hands—the demand becomes a physical confrontation. Boryna calls on the woodcutters from Modlica and Rzepki to listen, while the crowd’s repeated insistence that the forest is theirs makes ownership a public, collective declaration rather than a private calculation of shares.

The claim’s importance also lies in the poverty it cannot by itself remedy. During the men’s imprisonment, Filipka’s family has no potatoes left and has sold its quilt; another household faces a sick mother, a newborn child, empty fields, and no money for help. A villager condemns the better-off farmers for tending their own food and lending while the poor suffer close by, left to divine providence. These conditions clarify what is at stake in access to land and forest resources, while also showing that the community’s claim does not automatically produce mutual aid. The village may speak collectively against the manor and still leave its poorest members exposed.

The same organizing logic appears later in a different land dispute. Faced with the prospect of German settlers buying Podlesie, villagers propose approaching them together and warning them not to buy; if they proceed, the villagers threaten to prevent sowing and building. This is not the four-morg claim itself, but it shows how the forest conflict has made collective action thinkable as a means of defending land against outside control. Across these disputes, customary entitlement functions as both a standard for judging decisions and a language for mobilizing resistance. Its force comes from the villagers’ conviction that what they need and have long regarded as theirs cannot be reduced to whatever the manor chooses to offer.