The Lipce Forest Council Held Without Boryna is the meeting at which the Voyt, the Miller, and Antek’s Brother-in-law discussed the manor’s felling plans without Lipce’s leading farmer. The exclusion is more than a slight: it exposes a struggle over who may speak for the village as the manor threatens access to the forest and refuses local men work. Boryna takes the omission as a personal and political injury. Later, when the villagers assemble to resist the felling, their expectation that he should lead them shows how sharply the earlier council has unsettled his authority—and how much the community still depends on it.

The dispute behind the meeting

The forest dispute combines competing claims to land, customary use, and livelihood. In an earlier argument over pasturage, a complainant insists that the grazing ground belongs to the villagers, is recorded as theirs, and is repeatedly claimed by others; a cow has died after being driven off, and the loss is put at three hundred zlotys. Such complaints make clear that the forest dispute is not an isolated quarrel about trees. It belongs to a continuing contest over access to resources and the practical power to enforce claims.

Boryna’s own attachment to the forest is expressed in terms of measured land and anticipated use. As he rides through it, he counts his four morgen and Jagna’s one, studies the trees, and thinks that the manor considers the village’s claim too large while the villagers themselves have said too little. The forest is at once property, livelihood, and a visible measure of standing. That background gives the meeting’s omission a double force: the leaders have discussed a matter touching Boryna’s land and the village’s rights without including the man who sees himself as central to both.

The council and Boryna’s grievance

The news reaches Boryna through Rocho, who has come to ask whether the Squire really intends to exclude every villager from the felling. Boryna answers that the council took place at the Miller’s, then makes clear that he was not part of it: the Voyt, the Miller, and Antek’s Brother-in-law met, not he. Rocho also reports the village’s contrary understanding—that the Squire had visited Boryna and that Boryna had gone with him—so the conversation reveals confusion as well as exclusion. Boryna denies having conferred with the others, but the explanation does not soften the injury.

He keeps his resentment from Rocho, yet inwardly dwells on having waited and watched while the others deliberated without him. He takes the slight as evidence that the village has treated him as negligible, and promises himself that the others will learn what he means in Lipce. His anger settles on each participant: he accuses the Miller of having prospered at other people’s expense, dismisses the Voyt as unfit to lead his elders, and calls the blacksmith a self-interested upstart. He also turns against the Squire, whom he imagines circling the people like a wolf, living on peasant goodwill while selling peasant forests.

Boryna does not voice these accusations to his visitor. He restrains himself, partly because he will not complain in front of a guest, and instead rises from the bench and remarks that the Squire cannot be forced to hire anyone if he refuses. The contrast between this guarded response and his private fury shows how the exclusion works on him: he masks a challenge to his standing while already imagining how to reassert it. The council’s immediate subject is employment for the felling, but its unspoken consequence is a contest over who has the right to convene, decide, and lead.

From exclusion to public leadership

When the villagers later gather outside the inn, they wait for the elders, who have gone to fetch Boryna. The crowd fills the square and spreads to the road, but does not begin by acting without him. The narrative identifies him as first in the village and says that no farmer would take a step without him. This scene does not erase the earlier council; it answers it. The gathering recognizes the leadership that the smaller meeting had bypassed.

The blacksmith and the Miller try to deter the crowd, warning that the whole village could end up in chains and languish in jail. Their intervention fails. Villagers regard the two men as aligned with the manor and acting in their own interests, so their warnings cannot command the trust that Boryna’s leadership can. When he addresses the crowd, he frames the felling alongside accumulated injuries: the manor has refused the villagers employment, harried them, and left their complaints and legal appeals unanswered. He calls the destruction of the forest the last straw and urges farmers, hired hands, and the whole village to defend what belongs to them.

The response turns speech into coordinated action. The villagers cry, “To the forest!” and scatter home to prepare; within a short time they return armed, with horses, carts, and sleighs. Boryna waits with Płoszka, Kłąb, and the other leaders, then sets the group in motion after crossing himself. At the wood, he rushes ahead of the crowd and orders the woodcutters to stop and leave. The episode thus moves from an unrecorded council behind closed doors to a public assembly in which Boryna’s claim to leadership is enacted before the people.

Political meaning and consequences

The event stages two competing forms of authority. The first is the small council of village officials and interested men, conducted without Boryna and distrusted by the crowd. The second is the assembly itself: a mass of farmers, laborers, women, and young people that authorizes action through its presence and response. Boryna’s leadership is personal, grounded in his recognized rank, but it also becomes a vehicle for a collective grievance. His speech gathers scattered complaints—lost access, denied work, failed appeals—into a shared demand to defend the forest.

The later gathering does not make the community’s politics harmonious. Boryna’s private resentment includes wounded pride and hostility toward his rivals, while the villagers’ reasons for resisting extend beyond his affront. The narrative holds these motives together without reducing the mobilization either to an individual feud or to a perfectly unified movement. The forest is a common point of conflict, but the route to action runs through competing interests, suspicions, and unevenly recognized authority.

Later scenes echo this capacity for collective refusal in different circumstances. At the school-tax meeting, villagers decline to obey the notary’s demand that one of them fetch fish from the manor; when gendarmes try to move through a crowd, the peasants close around them before allowing them passage. These episodes are not the forest council itself, but they recall its political pattern: people who are usually ordered to listen, pay, and serve can, in a public gathering, withhold cooperation and make their numbers felt. The council held without Boryna matters because it exposes the limits of elite decision-making in Lipce—and because the villagers’ subsequent march makes visible the authority that the excluded leader and the assembled community can claim together.