Land scarcity and the hunger for land

Land scarcity and the hunger for land are defining pressures in Lipce: they make fields the measure of livelihood and inheritance, and turn the sight of nearby acreage into both a promise and a rebuke. Families need land for food and for their children’s future, yet poverty and lack of credit keep that need from becoming a purchase. The resulting frustration feeds arguments over work, forests, settlement, and who has the power to decide the village’s fate.

Land, livelihood, and family prospects

The farmers’ longing is grounded in the narrowness of their holdings. Their strips lie crowded together, and many can scarcely make it from one harvest to the next. Each household could use a few more morgans; a substantial adjoining tract might provide for sons and sons-in-law and make room for a new village with meadows and water nearby. Land is imagined not as an investment detached from daily life, but as the basis for a household’s continuity and a place for the next generation to settle.

That hope becomes more painful because young people are already visible as a demographic pressure. The cottages are bursting with occupants, while young villagers linger in the lanes with few prospects of acquiring farms of their own. The wish to divide land into family holdings confronts a hard limit: there is not enough money to buy it, and ordinary households can barely manage their existing needs. The land hunger is therefore also a crisis of succession. The young may be ready to establish households, but inheritance cannot create acreage that the village does not possess.

Poverty and the absence of purchasing power

The village’s winter hardship shows why land and employment are linked. At least twenty hired hands need work, and the squire’s planned felling at Wolf’s Hollow had seemed likely to provide it. Instead, the manor refuses to hire men from Lipce, reportedly in anger over a complaint lodged against it. Potatoes have frozen for some households; cash is scarce; and some people eat a hot meal only once a day before going to bed hungry. Villagers fear a preharvest period so lean that it is difficult to contemplate. Even the prospect of earning wages from forest work is taken away, leaving landless laborers exposed to hunger as well as landowners’ decisions.

A report heard by Hanka makes that deprivation concrete. Jagustynka describes visiting a cold cottage where straw has been stuffed into the windows and family members crowd together around the household’s single bed. The eldest daughter is gravely ill from hunger; the family has run out of potatoes and sold its quilt. They must beg the miller for groats because nobody will lend or extend credit until harvest. Another household faces a birth amid similar want: Florka is sick, has no savings, and has no milk for her newborn son. Her husband is among the imprisoned men, and the fields are standing fallow as spring approaches. These circumstances show how the shortage of money and labor compounds the shortage of land: even possession of a holding cannot sustain a family if there is no one to work it and no means to get through the hungry interval before harvest.

Podlesie and the imagined remedy

The fertile land at Podlesie concentrates the village’s hopes and resentments. It lies beside Lipce, yet the farmers fear German settlers will take possession and begin to dominate the area while local families remain crowded on their strips. To the villagers, the contrast is intolerable: desirable fields seem close enough to divide among their children, but ownership is beyond their reach. The parish priest is asked for advice, but he has no solution to offer; as the villagers understand it, no one can enter a purchase without money, and the poor are left facing the obstacles first.

Grzela redirects the argument from blaming fathers who will not hand over their farms to the underlying imbalance: Lipce has too little land for a population that keeps growing. What had been sufficient for three people in their grandfathers’ time must now be divided among ten. The answer suggested in the inn is to buy Podlesie and divide it among the villagers, but Mateusz immediately identifies the missing resource: the village has no money. One speaker, exhausted by overcrowding and the sight of land nearby that seems available, threatens to leave for town. His impatience exposes the personal cost of the impasse, while the rest still have to find a way to remain and manage somehow.

Grzela proposes a more specific, negotiated course: make peace with the squire and ask for four morgans of fields at Podlesie in exchange for a morgen of woodland. He points to a village near Płock that, according to his account, had made a similar arrangement. The prospect surprises and heartens the listeners, giving their desire for land a practical form rather than leaving it as complaint alone. On the walk back, old Kłąb sees how the plots might be divided; other villagers picture farms laid out with meadows and pasture. Their confidence remains conditional on the Germans standing aside, but the imagined division makes collective ownership and settlement seem tangible.

From private need to collective claim

The forest dispute shows how land hunger can become public action. Before the planned resistance to felling, villagers gather in the square by the inn and wait for Boryna, whom they regard as the first farmer and the proper leader. The blacksmith and the miller warn that the village could end up in chains and jail, but the crowd does not heed them, suspecting that both men have interests tied to the manor. The gathering turns many separate grievances into a shared claim: the manor is cutting the villagers’ forest, refusing them work, and repeatedly driving them toward ruin. Their demand is that the community defend what it regards as its own and stop the felling together.

The crowd’s movement from the inn to the forest gives that claim a physical shape. Men, hired hands, women, and older children prepare in haste, then assemble with poles, pitchforks, flails, and scythes. Some ride in carts or on horses; many set out on foot. Boryna waits with other leaders, and the villagers fall in behind them. This is not a direct resolution of the shortage of fields at Podlesie, but it reveals the shared moral and political logic behind the land question: decisions about land and its use are not accepted as the manor’s private concern when local livelihoods depend on them.

Scarcity within a wider struggle for voice

Land hunger does not disappear when villagers gather or devise a plan. Their imagined farms depend on access to Podlesie and on the settlers standing aside; their proposed exchange depends on the squire’s agreement; and their poverty leaves them without the capital to buy land outright. The contrast between fertile acreage nearby and households unable to borrow for food sharpens the sense that want is produced not only by limited resources but also by exclusion from decisions and opportunities.

The village’s resistance to being treated as subordinate appears in other public encounters as well. At the school-tax meeting, when the notary orders someone to fetch fish from the manor, no one moves; a villager objects that they did not come to run errands. Later, as gendarmes pass through a crowd of peasants, the villagers close around them before letting them through, then follow with angry voices and raised fists. These scenes do not settle the land question, but they place it within a larger struggle over whether villagers can act and speak for themselves. Land remains the material foundation of that struggle: the object of longing, the condition of family survival, and the measure of how far Lipce can shape its own future.