The Squire

The Squire is the landowning authority whose decisions over forest, work, and land repeatedly shape the conflicts around Lipce. Though he is not present in every confrontation conducted in his name, the manor’s control of resources gives his choices consequences for farmers, hired hands, and neighboring communities alike. He appears both as a powerful opponent of collective peasant claims and as a seller willing to make a consequential land bargain with Szymek Pacześ.

Identity and sphere of power

The Squire’s influence is chiefly institutional and economic: the manor controls land and organizes timber cutting, while its decisions determine who gets paid work. His authority reaches into customary access to grazing and woodland as well as into the cash income on which poor households depend. The evidence does not supply a personal history or a detailed account of the manor’s administration; it shows him through the decisions and disputes that make the estate’s power tangible in village life.

That power is contested at the level of ordinary use. Villagers complain that they are driven off pasture they consider theirs and that the claim is recorded in the register. They blame the estate-side exclusion for the loss of a cow, which they value at three hundred zlotys, and consider taking the matter to court or the commissioner. The accusation is voiced by villagers, not established as a personal act by The Squire; its importance lies in how a boundary dispute becomes a question of whose account of ownership will prevail.

Forest claims carry a similar weight. Riding through the ancient woodland, Boryna counts four morgen as his and adds the morgen associated with Jagna, while insisting inwardly that the villagers will not accept being wronged. The Squire’s estate, by contrast, regards the forest as available for felling. The competing claims are therefore not simply about timber: they concern land, customary entitlement, and the security villagers believe their holdings provide.

Logging, employment, and collective resistance

When the manor needs workers for felling, it makes agreements with people from other villages while excluding Lipce. The exclusion is confirmed by the woodsman, and the numbers make its local effect plain: workers are promised from Rudki, Modlica, Dębica, and Rzepki, but none from Lipce. For wealthy farmers this is not necessarily a household crisis; for laborers and families with little more than a cottage, winter work is a hoped-for means of survival. Some face frozen potatoes, scarce earnings, and meals reduced to once a day. Five or so families, the account says, have no winter work in the village and had been waiting for the felling as if for salvation.

The Squire is reported to be angry because a complaint has been lodged against him with the commissioner. Antek says he signed that complaint and will stand by it: not a fir should be cut until the manor reaches an agreement and grants what the villagers claim is theirs. The dispute thus joins two grievances that might otherwise seem separate—the denial of wages to local workers and the manor’s control of the woodland. For the poor, the refusal to hire is immediate hardship; for the wider village, cutting without agreement signifies the disregard of a claimed right.

The Squire’s response is not represented solely as a personal rebuke. The manor proceeds with the felling, and its men arrive to cut the trees. At the forest confrontation, Boryna leads a crowd of men, women, and youths against the woodcutters. The villagers shout that the forest is theirs; Boryna urges them to stand together and attacks the manor’s men with a wooden stake. The crowd drives the workers into retreat, and the steward is pulled from his horse and knocked unconscious. The Squire is not described as taking part in the fight. His estate’s project, however, has become the focus of a collective uprising in which disputes over rights, employment, and recognition converge.

Bargaining, alliance, and unequal benefit

The Squire’s dealings also produce alliances within the village. The Village Head of Lipce tells Boryna that he, The Miller, and the blacksmith have agreed with the manor to transport wood to the sawmill and planks to town. This arrangement offers a route to profit for a small group while other villagers complain that they are being denied a share of the work. Boryna hears the accusation that the partners will not let anyone else earn money. The episode exposes a division within Lipce: cooperation with the estate can be attractive to those offered a place in its business, even as exclusion sharpens resentment among those left out.

A separate exchange concerns the amount of land the manor should concede in a settlement. Bartek reports that the commissioner has said the villagers should not settle for two morgen and that The Squire must give more. The report does not settle the dispute; it shows officials and local negotiators entering a conflict in which the estate’s power is challenged through both collective pressure and formal channels. The two approaches coexist uneasily: villagers seek a better agreement, yet they also contemplate stopping the work if the manor cuts the forest before one is reached.

The estate’s social obligations become especially visible against the winter poverty described in Lipce. During the men’s imprisonment, households lack workers and income; one family has run out of potatoes and sold its quilt, while fields stand fallow and laborers have no earnings. Jagustynka condemns the better-off villagers for leaving the poor to divine care, naming the miller, the priest, the organist, and others as people who could help. This account is not a direct statement by The Squire, nor does it establish that he alone caused the hardship. It clarifies the wider moral stakes of decisions about work: resources and opportunities are controlled unevenly, while the costs of scarcity fall most heavily on those with least protection.

Land sale and confrontation over education

The Squire’s sale of Podlesie introduces a striking counterpoint to his conflict with Lipce over the forest. Szymek Pacześ is initially discouraged by the bleak, isolated land, but persists. The Squire sells it cheaply, at sixty roubles a morgen, and promises help with wood and other necessities. Szymek walks the boundaries, marking them with branches, and imagines establishing a home there for himself, Nastusia, and the future Pacześ line. The transaction gives Szymek an opportunity to build an independent farm; it also shows that The Squire can facilitate a peasant’s acquisition of land, even while the estate remains the object of broader resistance.

Later, in a conversation with Antek Boryna, The Squire asks about a meeting at the chancellery and reacts with astonishment when he learns that Antek openly raised the question of a Polish school. When Antek criticizes the former ruling class for driving people to labor under the whip and oppressing them, The Squire responds angrily, telling him to keep out of gentlemen’s business and stick to dung and pitchforks, then threatening that his tongue could be cut off. The exchange reveals a sharp boundary he seeks to enforce between political speech and peasant status. Antek’s answer that he practices what he preaches makes the confrontation more than a disagreement about schooling: it stages a contest over who is entitled to speak publicly about the country’s future.

Narrative role and significance

The Squire’s role is defined less by sustained access to his private thoughts than by the consequences of estate decisions. The narrative brings his power into view through registers, hiring agreements, timber partnerships, land sales, and the words he directs at Antek. Different village voices assess those actions from different positions: a poor laborer may see a lost winter wage, a farmer may see a threatened forest right, and a successful partner may see a chance to profit from transport. The resulting conflict cannot be reduced to a single village consensus, even when the peasants gather against the woodcutters.

These episodes make The Squire a focal figure in the tension between formal ownership and local claims of need and customary use. The forest dispute shows how exclusion from both land and employment can turn grievance into organized resistance; the Podlesie sale shows that land can also become the basis of a new household. His sharp rebuke of Antek extends the same question of authority into public speech. Across these different encounters, The Squire’s decisions help reveal who may use the land, who may earn from it, and who is expected to remain silent.