Horses

Horses in The Peasants are indispensable workers and transport, but they are not merely equipment in the village economy. They have distinct temperaments, ages, injuries, and ties to the people who feed and guide them. Their daily labor marks the seasons, their exposure to hunger and weather reveals the precariousness of rural life, and their presence in a tale of escape and punishment makes them a measure of human responsibility as well as endurance.

Ploughing and the work of the farm

Horses give physical form to the agricultural rhythms that organize Lipce. In one field scene, Walek notices a crooked furrow and calls to correct it. He watches two sturdy mares as they pull the creaking plough, then, when they reach the road, pats their necks. They extend their muzzles toward his face; the moment of contact follows the work rather than replacing it. Walek takes the plough again, swings the mares around, sets the shining coulter into the stubble, and drives them down a slope toward the village. Their movement lays out the long ridges of the cultivated landscape.

This scene presents ploughing as skilled cooperation. The driver watches the furrow and the animals’ pace; the team responds to reins, voice, and whip. When the right-hand mare begins to pull evenly after the whip, Walek’s satisfaction is practical, but the friendly muzzles also make visible a familiarity between human handler and animal. The narrative attends to the equipment, the horses’ movement, and the furrows together: farming is not an abstract occupation but an embodied process in which land, tools, and animal strength meet.

The horses’ work recurs in the household’s preparation for winter. After threshing, Maciej Boryna’s household gathers brushwood for mulch and kindling, while the farm’s other chores include feeding livestock and getting provisions ready against the coming rains. In the village, people carry ploughs, harrows, seed, and tools toward the fields; carts and herds crowd the roads. Horses make these seasonal tasks possible, but their needs also shape them. A farmhand brings fodder for the horses, and a returning worker waters them and fills their hay before giving a separate mare grain mixed with oats.

The labor is not effortless. Later, Antek Boryna ploughs newly manured land with horses straining against hard, baked clay. The clods crack, the animals pull so forcefully that their bridles nearly give way, and Antek alternates between flicking his whip and clicking his tongue to encourage them. He guides the plough into broad, straight furrows because wheat is to be sown there. When the work cannot continue, he puts the plough on skids, harnesses a gelding, and sets out to fetch another horse. The scene makes the animal team’s exhaustion part of the cost of cultivation, even as the furrows promise another crop.

Individual animals and human attachment

Several episodes distinguish a particular horse from the general work of the stable. A speaker bargaining over money and clothing pleads that a filly not be sold. He recalls that she was born beside him and that he wrapped her in his own sheepskin to keep her warm. To him she is not interchangeable property: she is obedient, valuable, and bound to a history of care. The appeal also exposes the material pressure behind such a sale. The horse has a price, but the seller’s attachment resists reducing her to it.

Age and dependence appear in the account of a blind mare belonging to the priest. The Parish Priest of Lipce searches behind trees and across fields after she goes missing, fearing that she may wander into a fence or break her legs. He had warned that she should be led to the pond, and regrets that she was allowed to go ahead alone. At least twenty years old, she had been raised from a filly and had earned her keep; the priest describes her devotion in terms usually reserved for a human companion. His fear is not simply of losing useful property. It is the distress of someone who knows the animal’s history and feels responsible for her safety.

Kuba’s care for the farm animals reverses the usual direction of dependence when he is laid up with his injured leg. He listens to the horses in the stable and speaks to them; they turn their heads from their mangers when he clicks his tongue. The filly breaks her halter, comes to his bunk, and presses her damp muzzle against his face. The contact is small but reciprocal: Kuba has watched over the animals, and now their approach gives him company while pain and weakness limit what he can do. Later, unable to rise, he worries that a mare groaning and trying to lie down may be close to giving birth. He asks that she be watched and watered, distressed that he lacks the strength to help her himself.

These passages place ordinary animal care beside the novel’s human crises. Feeding, watering, watching, and recognizing an animal’s habits are forms of responsibility repeated across the farm year. The horses’ vulnerability does not cancel their usefulness, but it complicates a purely economic view of them: a particular mare can be cherished for decades, and a particular filly can answer affection with her own approach.

Roads, weather, and village life

Horses connect the household to the village’s shared movement. On a busy morning, roads on both sides of the pond fill with cattle, sheep, dogs, carts, and people heading out to work. Boryna steers carefully through the herds, brushing past sheep and calves as the road narrows beneath dust rising from the dew. Elsewhere, the traffic is so crowded that people have to step down into the field furrows to make room. Horses are part of this collective circulation, carrying people and goods through a landscape that is also full of other animals and competing needs.

At a market-bound gathering, the procession includes carts loaded with livestock and poultry. Animals appear beneath hay or wicker frames, while geese and dogs add to the noise and congestion. A man says that he is content to walk but climbs onto the front seat of a cart, turning his back to the horses. The detail catches both the practical convenience of a ride and the casual familiarity with which people share crowded transport. Another cart carries Dominikowa’s widow with Jagna and Szymek; their cow follows tied by its horns, and geese stretch their necks from the cart. The journey is a moving picture of household possessions and labor, with horses and other animals woven into the ordinary business of travel.

The weather repeatedly tests that mobility. When the pond swells over its banks, water reaches the lower road, fences, and cottage walls. In the soaked peaty ground, a cart sinks to its axles; people have to help the horse pull it free of the mire. In winter, the road becomes hard and slick enough for sleighing, but the frost makes a long ride uncomfortable. During a blizzard, Boryna returns slowly with Witek and Ambrozy, and in the worst drifts they must lead the horses by their bridles. In another snowbound journey, a sleigh rushes down the road under its own momentum, with bells jingling through clouds of snow. The same animal power that carries people across the countryside is constrained by mud, ice, and the animals’ ability to keep their footing.

In the Christmas season, the horses belong to the village’s festive soundscape as well as its transport. The lanes fill with people, dogs race through the snow, horses neigh in the stables, and sleigh runners squeal over the hard roads. Smoke rises above the cottages as families prepare for the holiday. The horses are not the focus of the celebration, but their sounds and movement help make the entire village seem animated. Their presence changes with the season: plough teams in the fields, carts on wet roads, and sleigh horses on winter ice.

Conflict, scarcity, and collective vulnerability

Horses also register the dangers that disrupt ordinary farm life. In one theft, a farmhand returns from the mill for fodder to find that the horses and harness are gone and the dog in its kennel has been poisoned. The theft turns productive capacity into sudden absence: without the animals and equipment, a farm cannot simply resume its routine. The report is told with alarm, and the loss belongs to a larger world in which animals, tools, and people’s livelihoods are exposed to predation.

Later, Balcerkowa and her daughters raise the alarm when their horse disappears from an empty stable. Marysia Balcerkówna had gone to feed the livestock at daybreak and found the doors open and the manger vacant. The villagers follow hoofprints across the orchard to the Soltys’s barn, where the horse had been harnessed to a cart and driven out by way of the mill and the Wola road. The trail gives the community a concrete route to follow, but the horse is not recovered in the search described. Balcerkowa grieves beside the empty stall as though mourning a dead person; the vacancy recalls both the animal’s loss and the injury done to the household.

The thefts spread beyond one family. When searches bring back news of similar incidents in other villages, fear for property increases. The Voyt appoints watchmen, but with farmhands lacking, two women and older boys must patrol each night, every cottage must keep its own watch, and the girls are assigned to sleep in the stables and byres. The security response shows how the loss of animals reverberates through household labor and village arrangements. A stolen horse threatens more than a single owner’s wealth: it intensifies collective anxiety and changes who must keep watch and where they sleep.

At the forest conflict, horses are caught in violence rather than merely carrying people to work. After news spreads that the squire is felling the peasants’ forest, villagers rush to prepare sleighs and harness horses, then set out together. Antek Boryna, who has hidden in the tavern when his father appears, takes a shotgun and heads across the fields instead of joining the orderly procession. At the confrontation, Maciej Boryna leads the peasants against the woodcutters. The manor’s men resist, and horses lashed by flails rear and stand stock-still amid the blows and confusion. The team’s frightened reaction makes the animals part of the physical disorder of the clash: they bear the force of human conflict without choosing its cause.

The horse as parable and sign of continuity

A story told in the novel gives a horse a much larger moral role. It begins with a poor farmer who owns five morgen and a horse so wayward that kindness and oats do not make him work. When the farmer resorts to beating him at the plough, the horse remembers the violence and later kills the farmer while the man bends to remove his tethers. The animal escapes into the wide world, apparently free of the labor that had been forced upon him.

That freedom proves temporary. In summer, the horse lives by resting in the shade and grazing on other people’s wheat; when winter brings snow, frost, and scarce fodder, hunger drives him onward while wolves pursue and wound him. He eventually turns toward work again rather than die of hunger. In the story’s religious turn, the farmer who approaches him is Jesus, the Heavenly Master. The horse returns to the land of winter and, shortly before spring, stands at the old farmstead, thin and frightened, asking to be let in. The farmer’s widow and children recognize him, but remember the death and hardship that followed the farmer’s killing; they beat and drive him away.

The tale does not make the horse’s suffering a simple lesson in obedience. The animal has been abused, retaliates, escapes, and then discovers that life outside the farm is harsh and precarious. The widow’s response is shaped by her own injury and poverty: she repeatedly beats the horse as it works, and he endures the punishment as justly deserved. Years later, after she has remarried and added fields to her holding, she softens toward him. The story binds animal labor to human loss, material need, memory, and religious judgment without making any of them disappear into a single moral.

Across the novel, horses move between these different registers. They are the strength behind furrows and harvest carts, beloved companions whose histories matter, vulnerable bodies exposed to age and weather, and witnesses caught in the consequences of theft and violence. Near the end of Maciej Boryna’s life, he wanders through the farmyard, pats the horses, looks in on the cows, and reaches toward the plough before forgetting what he meant to do. The scene gathers farm, animals, and tool around a man whose working purpose is slipping away. Later, Antek ploughs with an exhausted team to sow wheat, while newly acquired lands are brought under cultivation; at harvest, heavy carts roll from every field toward open barns. The horses’ recurring labor thus links an old farmer’s fading grasp of his work with the next round of sowing and gathering.