Peasant–manor conflict over land and forests

Peasant–manor conflict over land and forests is a recurring struggle in The Peasants over who may use, control, and benefit from the resources on which village life depends. It begins in disputes over pasture and forest rights, but reaches beyond ownership: the manor’s decisions also affect work, food, and the prospects of poor households. As the villagers’ appeals to formal authority seem inadequate, their defense of the forest becomes a test of collective power and local justice.

Contested rights and unequal law

The conflict is already visible in an argument over grazing. One side insists that the pasturage is theirs and that the villagers keep driving them off; another account says the animals were chased away and a herdsman’s son badly beaten. A cow dies after the pursuit, reportedly from inflammation, and the loss is valued at three hundred zlotys. The exchange presents pasture not as an uncontested resource but as a place where rival claims, physical force, and material loss meet.

A lawsuit over the manor’s cows and the assault on herdsmen brings witnesses toward court, with Maciej Boryna already gone ahead. Jankiel treats the proceeding with skepticism: because the accused squire and the judge are both members of the landed class, he doubts that the squire will lose. His mockery makes the court seem less like an impartial remedy than another arena shaped by the power the villagers are challenging. The dispute nevertheless attracts a crowd and gives the conflict a public, evidentiary form: witnesses travel together, and the case is recognized as a shared village grievance.

Forest, livelihood, and local belonging

For Maciej Boryna, the woodland is measured at once in land and in trees. Riding through it, he counts his four morgens and adds Jagusia’s one, while estimating which trees are best. His calculation joins an individual stake in land to the wider question of what the manor may take or sell. The forest is not merely scenery: its timber and use are bound up with claims of ownership and with the villagers’ sense of what belongs to them.

That claim becomes more urgent when word spreads that the manor will fell the timber at Wolf’s Hollow after Epiphany. The trees have already been marked and the forest measured. Maciej first proposes a complaint to the commissioner, but the villagers answer that officials may act only after the wood has been cut. They recall what happened at Dębica and fear that a delay in judgment will make the remedy useless. Maciej then insists that they cannot allow the cutting to begin and agrees to attend a meeting at Kłąb’s house after church, where the community can decide what to do.

The Squire’s refusal to hire men from Lipce turns the forest dispute into an immediate employment crisis. Kłąb reports that the exclusion is punishment for the villagers’ defense of what they consider theirs; he expects the manor to find workers from Wola, Rudki, or Dębica instead. Hanka asks who else will cut the trees if not Lipce men, while Kłąb argues that outsiders are available and that the bought land is too far away to matter to local workers. The disagreement exposes the gap between the manor’s ability to choose its workforce and the villagers’ expectation that work on nearby land should sustain the people who live beside it.

Poverty and the stakes of resistance

For landless and hired workers, exclusion from the felling threatens more than a lost wage. One villager describes at least twenty hired hands desperate for work as winter deepens: potatoes have frozen for some, money is scarce, and the coming period before harvest promises little relief. Some already eat a hot meal only once a day and go to bed hungry. The expected employment at Wolf’s Hollow had offered a temporary prospect of income; the manor’s refusal removes it precisely when seasonal scarcity makes work most urgent.

The broader effects of poverty appear in accounts of households with too little food, credit, or labor. A cottage is described as cold, with straw stuffed into its windows and family members crowded into one bed; its potatoes and quilt have been sold, and the household must beg the miller for groats. Elsewhere, a sick mother has no savings or milk for her newborn, while the fields stand fallow because the men are imprisoned. These details do not make every hardship a direct result of the forest dispute, but they show why access to work and shared resources carries such weight in a village already exposed to hunger and labor shortages.

From complaint to collective action

The villagers’ response moves from litigation and complaint toward organized resistance. In the meeting, they distinguish the manor’s felling of their forest from timber already being sawn at the mill, which they identify as wood belonging to Jewish sellers from Rudki. That distinction matters: the protest is directed at a specific claim on woodland, not simply at every act of cutting. Once the villagers believe the manor has sold additional timber at Wolf’s Hollow and plans to fell it, they reject the idea that formal complaint alone can protect them in time.

When the crowd gathers, people wait for the elders to fetch Maciej Boryna, whose standing makes him the expected leader. The image of villagers packed together like trees in a forest gives the gathering a shape that echoes its cause: separate people form a dense body, awaiting direction. The blacksmith and miller try to deter them with warnings of imprisonment, but the crowd does not heed them, suspecting that both men have interests tied to the manor.

Maciej’s speech gathers grievances into a common claim. He addresses farmers and hired hands as Christian people and Poles, recalls injuries, confiscations, failed court actions, and unsuccessful complaints, then identifies the felling as the last straw. He calls on the whole village to defend what is theirs. The crowd answers, “To the forest!” People rush home to change, harness horses, and bring out sleighs and carts; they return armed with poles, pitchforks, flails, and scythes. Men, women, farmhands, and older children set out together, and Maciej leads from his sleigh after crossing himself.

Confrontation and political meaning

At the woodland clearing, the villagers descend on the woodcutters, shouting that they must stop and leave because the forest is theirs. Maciej runs ahead, and the crowd follows with sticks, pitchforks, flails, branches, and, in some hands, scythes; the women join with cries and their fingernails. He calls to the workers from Modlica, Rzepki, and elsewhere, making clear that the confrontation is between the village and the men hired to cut the trees, not simply an abstract dispute over property.

The episode gives the villagers’ customary claim a force that court proceedings have not provided, while also exposing the risks of acting outside formal institutions. Earlier, the crowd feared that officials would arrive too late; at the meeting, opponents warned that collective resistance could bring imprisonment. The forest thus becomes the point at which legal grievance, economic desperation, and communal authority converge. The conflict’s significance lies not only in who controls timber, but in the villagers’ insistence that decisions about local resources cannot be separated from their livelihoods or made without regard for the community that depends on them.