Lipce villagers’ opposition to the sale and felling of forest trees

Lipce villagers’ opposition to the sale and felling of forest trees turns a dispute over the Squire’s timber deal into a test of whether the village can defend its customary claims through collective action. The forest is at once a source of livelihood, a disputed right, and a measure of who can make decisions over the land. As legal appeals appear ineffective and logging threatens work as well as access, Boryna and other farmers rally Lipce peasants and hired hands to resist the felling directly.

The forest as right and livelihood

The immediate dispute concerns woodland the Squire has sold to Jewish buyers for logging. Villagers insist that the sale does not settle their claims: one speaker argues that not a single spruce should be touched until the Squire has reached an agreement with them. Others answer that the village will go out together, armed with whatever is to hand, rather than give up what they regard as theirs. Their opposition is therefore not simply a protest against trees being cut; it contests the manor’s authority to dispose of a resource the villagers believe they have a right to use.

That claim is connected to a wider struggle over access to land. In an earlier dispute over pasturage, a villager complains that registered grazing ground is repeatedly treated by the manor as its own, while villagers are driven away. Boryna, for his part, looks across the woodland and counts four morgen as his, adding a further morgen associated with Jagusia. His reckoning makes the forest’s division concrete: rights are measured in land, and the imagined or customary boundary matters even when the manor’s power threatens to override it.

The timber sale also has an immediate economic cost. At least twenty hired hands in Lipce are desperate for work, and the winter has already brought frozen potatoes, scant money, and households eating a hot meal only once a day. Villagers had expected that the felling at Wolf’s Hollow woodland would employ them. Instead, the Squire is said to have vowed not to hire anyone from Lipce after a complaint was lodged against him. Resistance thus carries a painful contradiction: stopping the logging may protect the villagers’ claims, but it also blocks work on which the poorest depend.

Disagreement over how to resist

The villagers’ early discussions expose competing ideas about justice and the risks of confrontation. Some favor taking the matter to court or to the commissioner; Boryna’s father is said to want a lawsuit. Others distrust official remedies, arguing that the commissioner is aligned with the Squire and that a complaint has not stopped the sale. Their preferred response is to assemble as a band and drive away the loggers. The dispute is therefore also over which institutions can be trusted and whether a formal claim can protect a right in practice.

At a crowded gathering, news that the buyers have marked the trees and are waiting for frost and sleighs sharpens the debate. Boryna rejects the idea that marking amounts to permission to fell: the axes, he insists, will have to wait. A proposal to complain to the commissioner meets his resistance, and he calls instead for the villagers to go together and chase off the workers. The Miller, who has reached an understanding with the buyers and expects to saw the wood at his mill, tries to turn the gathering away from the dispute. The farmers continue their discussion out of his hearing and agree to meet at Boryna’s to plan, showing how economic interests within the village complicate any claim to a united front.

From private consultation to mass mobilization

When the confrontation becomes imminent, the crowd gathers in the square outside the inn. People wait for the elders, who have gone to fetch Boryna; his standing as the village’s foremost farmer makes his presence central to their decision to act. The blacksmith and The Miller warn that the villagers may end up in chains or in jail, but the crowd does not heed them, suspecting that both men have interests tied to the manor. Fear of punishment is real, yet warnings from those viewed as compromised cannot dissolve the gathering’s resolve.

Boryna’s address makes the timber dispute part of a longer catalogue of grievances. He speaks to farmers and hired hands together, presenting the felling alongside refusals of employment, harassment, confiscations, and unsuccessful complaints. The crowd answers with anger and calls to drive the loggers away. Boryna then urges the whole village, including anyone able to move, to defend what it regards as its right and justice. His appeal joins material claims to shared identity: those gathered are addressed as Christian people and Poles as well as inhabitants whose forest is being cut.

The call is followed by practical preparation rather than remaining a speech. Villagers rush home to change, harness animals, and bring out sleighs; horses neigh, children shout, and women lament as the village prepares. Within a short time, they return armed and gather on the road with Boryna, Płoszka, Kłąb, and other leaders. Peasants, hired hands, women, and some older children travel on sleighs, horses, and carts, while many walk. Poles, pitchforks, flails, and scythes rise above the crowd. Boryna stands on his sleigh, crosses himself, and leads them onward after a prayer, placing collective action within the community’s religious language as well as its political resolve.

Confrontation and the limits of the evidence

At the wood, the arriving crowd descends on the woodcutters. Boryna leaps from his sleigh and leads the rush; others follow with sticks, pitchforks, flails, branches, and a scythe, while women join with cries and their fingernails. The villagers shout for the workers to stop and leave because the forest is theirs. Boryna calls directly to the woodcutters, identifying them as people from Modlica, Rzepki, and elsewhere. The confrontation makes visible what the earlier meetings had proposed: the villagers attempt to enforce their claim not through a court order but by physically interrupting the work.

The account establishes the scale and force of the mobilization, but the evidence for this state does not by itself settle the forest dispute’s final outcome. It does show how the proposed sale brings together land claims, employment, distrust of official channels, and competing village interests. The forest becomes the point at which dispersed grievances are made public and collective: a crowd that had waited for Boryna now moves as a body, while the tools of everyday rural life become signs of its willingness to defend what it considers its own.