The manor’s ban on hiring Lipce villagers

The Squire’s ban on hiring Lipce villagers for logging work makes access to wages part of the village’s wider struggle over the forest. By denying local laborers the work they had expected from felling at Wolf’s Hollow, the manor deepens hardship and gives economic desperation a common target; the exclusion becomes one of the grievances that drives collective resistance.

The Ban and Its Background

The policy is described as a refusal to employ anyone from Lipce in the manor’s forest operations. Villagers connect it to a complaint made against The Squire before the commissioner: one speaker says The Squire was angered by the complaint, and a villager who had signed it insists that the timber must not be cut until the manor reaches an agreement with them. The stated explanation is therefore part of the villagers’ account of the dispute, rather than a formally documented order or an independently established motive.

The exclusion lands amid a broader conflict over access to land and woodland. Boryna thinks of four morgen as his customary claim in the forest and counts another morgen associated with Jagna; he sees the manor as claiming too much while the villagers say they have received too little. Elsewhere, a villager points to a register as proof of the community’s claim to pasture. These assertions frame the work ban as more than a lost job opportunity: to the villagers, it accompanies the denial of rights they believe they possess.

Livelihood Costs

The expected logging work matters especially to hired hands and poorer farmers with little income during winter. At least twenty hired laborers are described as desperate for work. Snow and frost have damaged some households’ potatoes, cash is scarce, and the lean period before harvest is feared in advance. Some families already manage only one hot meal a day, while people with nothing to sell or take to town borrow flour or plead for salt, groats, and bread. The forest job had represented a temporary source of earnings for people with few alternatives.

The ban also affects villagers beyond those directly seeking wages. The account of the deepening poverty describes hired hands and poorer farmers alike as without earnings, while The Squire remains unwilling to let anyone from Lipce earn money in the forest, even after a delegation has pleaded with him. A later account of the same hardship describes a family with no potatoes, a sold quilt, and a hungry child, and another household facing childbirth while the men are imprisoned and the fields stand fallow. The policy is not presented as the sole cause of these crises, but it belongs to the conditions that make poverty harder to withstand.

From Exclusion to Collective Resistance

When word spreads in mid-March that The Squire has begun felling the forest, the villagers initially doubt it. The news makes the existing dispute immediate: the forest is being cut while Lipce people have been shut out of the work they expected. As the crowd gathers, they wait for Boryna, whom the narration identifies as the village’s leading farmer. The Squire’s allies urge restraint, but the assembled villagers do not heed them.

Boryna’s appeal joins the ban on employment to the forest grievance and other injuries attributed to the manor. He tells farmers and hired hands that they have suffered injustice, that the manor has refused them work, and that complaints and court action have brought no remedy. The crowd answers with calls to go to the forest. People hurry home to prepare, then set out together—farmers, laborers, women, and older children, carrying poles, pitchforks, flails, and scythes. At the clearing, they confront the woodcutters and demand that they leave, asserting that the forest is theirs.

A later retelling describes the villagers as acting because the timber had been sold without their knowledge, the felling had begun, and Lipce’s hired hands were denied work. It says the villagers drove the woodcutters from the forest and that Boryna was brought back with his head split; it also reports that Antek Boryniak beat a woodsman to death in response to his father’s injury. The ban thus forms one strand in a confrontation that escalates beyond a labor dispute into a violent clash.

Significance

The policy exposes the connection between control of natural resources and control over village livelihoods. The forest is at once a contested source of customary rights and the place where villagers hoped to earn wages; excluding them from logging compounds the injury of losing access with the immediate threat of hunger. The Squire’s refusal also turns separate hardships into a shared political complaint, helping Boryna call farmers and hired hands to act together. The ensuing resistance asserts the community’s own account of justice, though the violence and injuries show the severe cost of confronting the manor’s authority.