The poor villagers’ appeal over the logging work

The poor villagers’ appeal over the logging work brings two claims into collision: Maciej Boryna’s insistence that the manor must recognize Lipce’s rights in the forest, and the urgent need of landless laborers for winter employment. The Squire’s decision to hire workers from neighboring villages while excluding Lipce turns a dispute over woodland into a crisis of subsistence. Rocho carries that news to Boryna, but the appeal for the poor meets a firm refusal; the villagers must seek the Parish Priest’s help, and their hardship later feeds into a much larger movement to stop the felling.

The work denied

The immediate news reaches Boryna in the evening, after Rocho comes to the household and asks whether it is true that the Squire will summon no one from Lipce for the felling. The report has come from a council held at the Miller’s. Boryna is already resentful that the others met without him, and the exclusion touches both his standing in the village and the forest dispute. He regards the council’s omission as an insult, but tells Rocho that the Squire cannot be forced to hire anyone.

The villagers’ fear is supported by concrete arrangements, not rumor alone. At High Mass they have heard that workers have been engaged elsewhere: ten from Rudki, fifteen from Modlica, about eight from Dębica, and nearly twenty from Rzepki. The woodsman confirms that no one from Lipce is included. The Squire has both made agreements and paid advances, leaving the village’s poor with little reason to expect that ordinary requests will change the decision.

The stakes are especially severe for people who depend on casual work. Some can thresh for farmers, cut wood at the mill, or take whatever jobs appear, but several families have no work in the village during winter. The cold has frozen potatoes for some households; many have almost no money saved, and others are running out of their food stores. With spring still distant and a lean preharvest period ahead, the felling had seemed to offer wages at the very moment they were most needed. Its exclusion of Lipce workers threatens not an abstract loss of opportunity but hunger before the next harvest.

Boryna’s refusal and the priestward appeal

Boryna will not ask the Squire to relent. He says that he signed the complaint against the manor and will stand by it: the trees should not be cut until the Squire reaches an agreement with the villagers and gives them what they consider theirs. The position is consistent with his opposition to the felling, but it does not answer Rocho’s question about the poor. When Rocho stresses that at least twenty hired hands need work, Boryna says that he cannot provide employment himself and asks who would help him if he were harmed while defending other people’s interests.

His answer draws a boundary around responsibility. Boryna says he is on the side of himself and justice, and assigns the relief of the poor to the priest rather than to one farmer. He invokes poverty as something no individual can overcome, even as Rocho quietly insists that one person can still do much. Rocho leaves heavy-hearted, surprised by Boryna’s hardness in the face of deprivation. The exchange does not resolve the forest claim; it shows how a shared opposition to the manor can coexist with reluctance to bear another person’s immediate risk.

The poor do turn to the Parish Priest. In the village, people gather in cottages to discuss what can be done, then try to persuade Kłąb to lead them to him. Kłąb declines, citing his daughter’s betrothal, and others evade the task because they are occupied with their own affairs. Bartek from the Sawmill is angered by this retreat. Although he has work, he stands with the poor, and he goes with Filipka, Stach Płoszka, Bartek Kozioł, and another villager to ask the priest to intercede with the Squire. This small delegation gives the appeal its practical form: where Boryna will not plead for employment, the laborers ask a religious authority to carry their case.

From hardship to collective resistance

The appeal belongs to a wider conflict over who bears the cost of the manor’s decision. Later, a woman speaking to Hanka recounts the condition of households struck by the arrests and loss of labor. Filipka’s eldest daughter is dangerously weak from hunger; the family has no potatoes, has sold its quilt, and must beg groats from the miller. Florka has given birth while ill and impoverished, with no money or help and fields left uncultivated because Adam is imprisoned. The account makes the earlier fear of lost logging wages part of a broader crisis: poverty deepens when laborers are absent, credit is scarce, and the work of sustaining households falls on those still at home.

That later lament also condemns the separation between rich and poor within one village. Farmers, it observes, attend to food and lending at interest while the poorest are left to divine care; neighbors live close enough to share a village yet remain unmoved by one another’s need. The contrast clarifies the moral force of the appeal. The workers are asking for wages, but their case also tests whether shared residence and customary claims create obligations beyond a person’s own household and property.

The refusal to employ Lipce workers becomes one of the grievances voiced when the villagers later assemble against the felling. The crowd waits for Boryna because he is the foremost farmer and the man others expect to lead them. The blacksmith and the Miller try to discourage resistance, warning of imprisonment, but the villagers distrust their motives and do not heed them. In the gathering’s public speech, the denied jobs are placed beside the cutting of the villagers’ forest and a history of complaints and injuries. The demand for work has not displaced the claim to the woodland: both are presented as parts of the same injustice.

The crowd then breaks up to prepare, bringing peasants, hired hands, women, and older children together with horses, carts, sleighs, poles, pitchforks, flails, and scythes. Boryna waits with the other leaders at the poplar road, and the villagers set out toward the forest as a body. This mobilization is not simply the successful outcome of the delegation’s request for intercession; it marks a shift from asking the Squire to reconsider to acting collectively to stop the felling.

Significance and limits of the appeal

The appeal exposes a fault line within the village’s resistance. Boryna defends the community’s forest rights, yet refuses to make the poor workers’ need his own responsibility. The laborers, meanwhile, have to navigate the same hierarchy that shapes the forest dispute: influential men may decline to represent them, and the Squire controls access to paid work. Their turn to the priest is both a practical attempt at mediation and evidence of how little leverage they possess on their own.

The episode also establishes the material basis of the later collective action. The exclusion from logging gives the villagers a specific, immediate grievance, while the winter scarcity described around it makes delay dangerous. When employment, forest access, and village justice are brought together in the later assembly, the earlier appeal has already shown what is at stake for those who cannot wait for spring. Its force lies in that unresolved tension: the community can speak and move as one against the manor, but its poorest members first have to ask whether anyone within the community will act for them.