The status hierarchy between peasants and farm laborers

The status hierarchy between peasants and farm laborers in Lipce is expressed not only through differences in property and work, but through rules about who may occupy which place in public life. Maciej Boryna gives that order a religious justification when he tells Kuba that a farmhand is not a farmer and that each person has been allotted a different station. Yet Kuba’s longing to stand among the farmers, the hired workers’ exposure to want, and the villagers’ joint resistance to the manor reveal the strain beneath this apparently settled arrangement.

Rank and Recognition

Kuba’s attempt to enter the farmers’ place at church makes the hierarchy visible as a matter of bodily position and public regard. After receiving a zloty from The Parish Priest of Lipce, he walks toward the church with unusual pride, draws himself up as much as his crooked leg allows, and carries himself like a proper farmer. He does not remain in the porch, the place he believes is proper for him. Instead, he presses through the crowd to the high altar, where farmers stand alongside those carrying the baldachin or holding candles during the Elevation.

The other worshippers respond with astonishment, dismay, harsh words, and looks that make Kuba feel as if he has intruded like a dog where he was not invited. He ignores them. The coin in his fist and the priest’s kindness have briefly given him a sense of worth that the village ordinarily denies him. His fervent singing at the altar turns a breach of social convention into a claim to spiritual belonging: his position in the village may be low, but his devotion is not.

Maciej Boryna soon makes the boundary explicit. He invokes respect for elders and the order of the world, telling Kuba that he must not raise himself above the place assigned to him. In this account, the hierarchy is not presented as an arrangement people might alter, but as a divinely allotted order that even the priest would affirm. Kuba understands the practical implication: if he were a farmer, he says, he could carry the baldachin, sit in the pews, and sing from the prayer book; as a farmhand, though a farmer’s son, he must stand in the vestibule or by the door. His description exposes the contradiction in the rule’s moral language: a man may be born to a farmer and remain a Christian, yet still be treated as beneath the farmers because he has not attained their standing.

Work, Property, and Insecurity

The distinction also governs access to livelihood. When the squire refuses to hire men from Lipce for the felling at Wolf’s Hollow woodland, the consequences fall especially hard on hired hands who depend on wages rather than a farm of their own. One speaker counts at least twenty villagers desperate for work. Winter frost has damaged potatoes, some households already eat a hot meal only once a day, and the approaching preharvest season promises hunger before new crops can help. The hoped-for logging work had been a possible source of income; exclusion from it threatens immediate survival.

The episode shows how employment decisions by the manor can reinforce the vulnerability of people who have little security beyond their labor. The refusal is tied to the squire’s anger over a complaint lodged against him, while the workers bear the material cost. Antek will not beg the squire to relent. He says he signed the complaint and will stand by it, insisting that the manor must reach an agreement before cutting the firs. His position puts the collective claim to the forest ahead of the immediate hope of wages, even as the discussion makes clear what that choice may cost the poorest villagers.

A later account of village hardship broadens the picture beyond the logging dispute. A daughter of Filipka lies gravely ill in a freezing cottage, with straw stuffed in the windows; the family has no potatoes left and has sold its quilt. They must beg the miller for groats, but credit is scarce before harvest. Florka, newly delivered of a healthy boy, is sick, has no savings, and cannot feed him; with her husband imprisoned, there is no one to work the fields. These details make poverty a condition that reaches into food, shelter, childcare, and cultivation, rather than a temporary shortage of cash alone.

A Hierarchy Challenged by Mutual Obligation

The same account condemns the indifference that allows such hardship to persist beside better-off households. Farmers, the speaker says, concern themselves with what will fill their own stomachs or whom they can lend to at the highest interest, while the poor remain nearby and suffer. Appeals to divine order become an excuse for leaving relief to Jesus, even as people protect their own comfort from the sight and sound of their neighbors’ need. The criticism is not simply that wealth differs, but that those with greater means refuse the obligations that proximity and shared village life might impose.

The forest dispute briefly creates a different alignment. Addressing both farmers and hired hands as Christian Poles, Antek names their common injuries: the manor is felling the forest, has refused them employment, and continues to harry them. The crowd answers with demands to stop the cutting. When the manor’s men attack, Maciej Boryna calls for the peasants to stand together and is first to charge with a wooden stake. Behind him, villagers close ranks with flails and pitchforks; the manor’s men retreat, and the steward is dragged from his horse. The action does not erase the distinction between farmer and farmhand. It shows, instead, that a common grievance can momentarily make a collective force out of people whose ordinary positions and resources differ.

Gender and the Meaning of Social Order

The novel also presents village rank alongside a gendered standard of judgment. When news arrives of trouble involving Tereska, Jagustynka objects that a man may leave his woman alone for years and sow wild oats without attracting the condemnation directed at a woman when something happens to her. If the pair sinned together, she argues, responsibility should not fall on the woman alone. Her complaint does not make gender inequality identical to the division between farmers and laborers; it shows that the village’s language of order can justify distinct forms of unequal treatment at once.

Together, these episodes make the hierarchy more than a label for differences in occupation. It is enforced through everyday placement, economic dependence, and judgments about who deserves respect or aid. Kuba’s advance to the altar exposes its humiliating limits; the hunger of Lipce’s hired workers reveals its material stakes; and the forest confrontation demonstrates how shared vulnerability can interrupt, without abolishing, the social divisions that shape village life.