The manor’s policy of excluding Lipce villagers from logging work

The Squire’s policy of excluding Lipce villagers from logging work made the contested felling at Wolf’s Hollow woodland both a struggle over customary claims and a crisis of survival. The decision deprived local laborers of wages they had counted on through the winter, while the manor hired crews from elsewhere. In the novel, that exclusion gives the forest dispute an immediate human cost: the village’s claims to land and trees are bound to the question of who will have work, food, and cash before spring.

The decision and its material stakes

The policy comes into view first as troubling village news. Rocho visits Boryna’s household to ask whether it is true that the Squire has taken against Lipce and will summon none of its villagers for the felling. The rumor has a specific political context: a council at the miller’s has discussed the matter, and the Squire is said to be angered by a complaint lodged against him with the commissioner. Boryna says he has signed the complaint and will stand by it; he will not go begging the Squire for work or abandon the demand for an agreement over the forest.

The exclusion is then confirmed in concrete numbers. At High Mass, villagers hear that the Squire has already made agreements and paid deposits to crews from other places: ten men from Rudki, fifteen from Modlica, about eight from Dębica, and nearly twenty from Rzepki. The woodsman confirms the report. The manor needs workers for the felling, but not one is to come from Lipce. This is not merely a failure to offer jobs; the advance arrangements make the exclusion deliberate and difficult to dismiss as a misunderstanding.

The lost work matters especially because the winter is harsh and little money is in circulation. Rocho says that at least twenty hired hands in Lipce are desperate for employment. Some households have already lost potatoes to frost, and some people eat a hot meal only once a day before going to bed hungry. They had expected the felling at Wolf’s Hollow woodland to provide work. Without those wages, the already difficult interval before spring threatens to become still more severe.

The village’s unequal exposure

The effects fall unevenly across Lipce. The village includes wealthy farmers, smaller landholders who do not rely on the same earnings, and people whose poverty is so acute that they conceal it rather than risk losing the friendship of the wealthy. Hired hands and people with no more than a cottage piece together a living by threshing for farmers, working at the mill, and taking whatever labor they can find. Around five families, however, have no winter work in the village and had been waiting for the felling as if it were their salvation.

This division helps explain why the policy does not produce a single, immediate village response. Some people have their own interests to protect; others avoid leading the poor to seek help. When the struggling laborers gather in their cottages and try to find someone to approach the Parish Priest of Lipce, Kłąb declines to lead them, citing his daughter’s betrothal, and others evade the request as well. Bartek from the Sawmill is angered by this retreat. Although he has work, he stands with the poor, and he joins several villagers in going to the priest to ask for intervention.

The novel places this immediate employment crisis within a longer conflict over access to land and forest. Earlier, a villager condemns the repeated driving of people from pasture claimed in the register, and the loss of a cow is put at three hundred zlotys. Boryna, meanwhile, looks over the woodland and counts the four morgens he believes are his, adding Jagusia’s one morgen to his calculation. These episodes show that the logging dispute is not simply about a temporary labor contract: villagers connect the manor’s decisions about the forest with older claims of use, ownership, and injury.

From grievance to collective resistance

At the gathering before the villagers go to the forest, the crowd waits for Boryna because he is regarded as the first farmer and the person expected to lead. The blacksmith and the miller try to deter the villagers by warning that they will end up in chains and jail, but the crowd distrusts their advice, believing both men to be aligned with the manor and their own interests. The dispute has moved beyond private complaints: the village is weighing the danger of action against the danger of surrendering what it considers its right.

Boryna’s appeal brings the separate grievances together. He addresses both farmers and hired hands, arguing that the manor has wronged them, denied them employment, and continued to drive them toward ruin. He recalls complaints and legal efforts that have brought no remedy, then presents the felling as the last straw. The villagers answer with a demand to stop the cutting. The policy of excluding them from work thus becomes part of a larger accusation: the manor is taking the forest while refusing to share the employment that its exploitation would create.

The decision is followed by swift preparations. The crowd breaks apart to fetch weapons, harness horses, and bring out sleighs and carts. Within a short time, peasants, farmhands, women, and older children assemble, carrying poles, pitchforks, flails, and scythes; many others go on foot. Boryna waits with other leaders at the poplar road, then crosses himself and gives the signal to proceed. When the villagers reach the woodcutters, they rush forward and demand that the outsiders stop and leave the forest, insisting that it belongs to them.

Wider significance

The policy’s force lies in the conjunction of exclusion and need. The Squire’s hiring choices distribute the work beyond Lipce even as local households face frozen stores, scarce cash, and hunger. The resulting anger is therefore both economic and moral: villagers see the denial of work as one more injury within a continuing conflict over the manor’s authority and their claims to the forest. The book also refuses to portray Lipce as a unified community without divisions. Wealth, dependence on wages, fear of punishment, and private interests shape who is willing to speak or act on behalf of the poor.

Later, villagers propose confronting German buyers of Podlesie together and threatening to prevent them from sowing or building if they proceed. That episode concerns settlement and land rather than the hiring policy itself, but it echoes the same collective strategy developed in the forest dispute: face an external power as a village, state a shared claim, and make noncompliance costly. In the logging conflict, however, the exclusion has already made the stakes immediate. Work that might have carried families through winter is withheld, and the village’s demand for access becomes a march to the place where the trees are being cut.