Maciej Boryna–Jagna

Maciej Boryna and Jagna’s betrothal is a marriage arrangement in which land, family authority, and personal desire pull in different directions. Maciej’s promise to transfer six morgs to Jagna helps secure the match, but Jagna’s subdued consent does not amount to enthusiasm: she says the decision belongs to her mother, and that betrothal is not marriage.

The Betrothal and Its Terms

The match takes shape in a village already strained by the approach of winter. Households debate what to sell and what they must buy; taxes, communal contributions, debts, and payments to servants press on their limited cash. Against that background, a marriage involving a substantial land settlement is not merely a private promise. Land offers security, while its transfer also touches the claims of Maciej’s grown children and the future resources of his farm.

Ambrozy points across the pond toward Maciej’s house while discussing the proposed match with Jagna and her mother, Dominikowa. He presents Maciej as a prosperous, devout, still-strong farmer who might also help with Jędrzych’s approaching military service. Jagna is asked what she thinks. Her answer is quiet and detached: if her mother says she must go, she will go; the choice is not hers. The thought of Antek briefly unsettles that apparent indifference, but she does not reject the proposal. When Ambrozy asks whether the matchmakers should be sent, Jagna agrees, adding that an engagement is not yet a marriage. Ambrozy then crosses himself and goes straight to Maciej’s house.

The arrangement becomes public the next day, when news spreads through Lipce that Maciej has sent vodka to Jagna’s household. The Voyt’s wife, who has been told not to reveal the news before her husband returns, nevertheless whispers it to a neighbor while borrowing salt. The episode shows how quickly a family agreement becomes village knowledge, and how gossip carries the betrothal beyond the people who negotiated it.

At the formal drinking, Dominikowa confirms the match directly to Maciej: Jagna is his. Maciej embraces and kisses her, then asks whether she has promised a marriage settlement. His offer grows into a specific commitment. He says he will settle six morgs on Jagna: five morgs and a piece of woodland are discussed, with the six chosen fields described as the land by the road where potatoes had been grown in summer. The proposed transfer alarms him because these are his best fields and because his children may object. The match is therefore bound from its outset to a dispute over how much of the family estate should pass to Jagna.

Settlement, Consent, and Unequal Power

The land promise was made to sound both generous and reversible. When Maciej Boryna balked at giving up his best fields, the matchmaker reassured him that the settlement would serve as security for Jagna: while Maciej lived, no one would take the land from him, and the fields Jagna was due from her father could be surveyed in spring, after which Maciej could sow them. That assurance eased his hesitation, but it did not erase the material stakes. Six morgs by the road, including the ground where potatoes had grown that summer, were to be assigned to Jagna, while Maciej’s children remained an acknowledged source of concern.

The agreement moved quickly from talk to legal act. The first banns for Jagna and Maciej Boryna were posted on Sunday; on Saturday, they had ridden to town, where Maciej signed over the six morgs to Jagna before a notary. The sequence made the betrothal more than a promise exchanged over drink: the intended marriage was publicly announced and backed by a notarized transfer. Yet the settlement also exposed the difference between formal provision and personal consent. Jagna had accepted the match on her mother’s authority, and the narrative does not present the land arrangement as a choice she freely negotiated.

Maciej’s conduct on the return journey makes that imbalance intimate. He came home late, somewhat drunk, with scratches on his face: he had tried to take Jagna in the cart, but she resisted him with her fists and fingernails. The episode punctures the image of the settlement as a placid exchange between a benefactor and a grateful bride. Maciej could promise land and secure the agreement through family and village custom, but Jagna’s physical refusal showed that betrothal and a signed document could not command her desire or her body.

Land, Labor, and the Household Economy

The settlement’s significance becomes clearer against the seasonal pressures that shape life in Lipce. As winter approached, families had to reckon with taxes, communal contributions, debts, servants’ wages, and purchases of clothing and farm tools, while ready cash grew scarce. Even households with fifteen morgs weighed whether to take a horse or cow to the fair; poorer families had less room to maneuver. Maciej’s promise of six morgs therefore concerned more than the appearance of generosity: it placed a substantial piece of productive land at the center of a match negotiated amid widespread anxiety over how to meet immediate obligations and preserve a livelihood.

The later agricultural crisis makes the value of such land especially legible. When the men of Lipce were imprisoned after the forest conflict, the fields stood fallow for want of labor, while the women faced childbirth, livestock care, planting, drainage, manure-hauling, and the work of feeding children. Neighboring villagers eventually brought ploughs and carts, and the empty fields revived as people set to work and sowed seed. The contrast clarifies what a land settlement means in this world: fields are not passive property but the ground on which household survival depends, and their use requires labor at particular moments in the seasonal cycle. Maciej and Jagna’s agreement thus joins marriage to an economic order in which land can promise security, provoke conflict among heirs, and matter only through the work that keeps it fruitful.

The Betrothal’s Limits

The formal settlement did not dissolve the pressures inside either household. At Maciej’s farm, his children now knew what had been arranged, and the first banns had been posted; the public and legal steps of the match therefore made the allocation of land a family question as well as a village matter. The agreement placed Jagna’s future security in the same fields that Maciej’s children could regard as part of their inheritance, leaving the promise exposed to the conflict it was meant to settle.

Nor did the transfer make the relationship emotionally reciprocal. Jagna had yielded to her mother’s decision, and her resistance in the cart made plain that formal consent to a betrothal was not consent to intimacy. The arrangement could name her as Maciej’s future wife and attach six morgs to that position, but it could not ensure affection or obedience. Its central tension lies in that gap: land gives the match material force, while Jagna’s words and actions show how little that force can guarantee about her personal choice.