Winter poverty and hunger among Lipce’s poor

Winter poverty and hunger among Lipce’s poor become acute when the village’s poorest households lose the seasonal work they expected from the manor’s timber felling. With potatoes running out, little money in reserve, and spring still distant, hunger is not an abstract threat but a daily pressure on food, warmth, and the capacity to work. The crisis also reveals how unevenly hardship is shared: households with land or steady work can endure, while hired laborers and cottage-dwellers face a winter with few means of support.

The lost promise of winter work

The squire’s decision not to hire men from Lipce turns the woodland dispute into an immediate livelihood crisis. At least twenty hired hands in the village need work, and some have already seen their potatoes freeze. People fear a lean preharvest season before spring can bring relief; some households are already managing only one hot meal a day and going to bed hungry. The expected felling work had seemed a possible answer to the winter’s lack of income, but the squire is angered by a complaint made against him to the commissioner and refuses to employ a single local man.

The exclusion is especially stark because work has been arranged elsewhere. At High Mass, villagers learn that the squire has made agreements and paid advances to laborers from Rudki, Modlica, Dębica, and Rzepki, while Lipce is left out. The woodsman confirms the report. The unequal distribution makes the loss more than a general shortage of jobs: people who need the wages see work being assigned to neighboring communities while their own households face hunger. Some poorer residents nevertheless stand with the wealthy, unwilling to admit their need and risk losing the friendship of those with more influence.

Hunger inside the household

The winter’s privation is made tangible in the home of Hanka Borynowa and her children. With the family living at her father Bylica’s house, Hanka describes three weeks in which shouting and quarrelling have become routine. She is caring for a whimpering child in the cradle while also confronting the strain of a crowded, unsettled household. These disputes do not create the underlying poverty, but they show how hardship presses on relationships as well as on the body.

The shortage of fuel compounds the shortage of food. Bylica follows Hanka out into the storm because the children are shivering indoors and there is no firewood with which to cook; the family has been reduced to dry bread. Hanka joins the other poor women and hired hands to gather wood, carrying it on her back despite the cold and exhaustion. She refuses both to complain and to seek help, not because the hardship is slight, but because she sees no dependable source of rescue and will not let herself and the children be ruined or made objects of pity.

When Bylica warns her that she may fall ill, Hanka answers that someone must do the work. She explains that the family has run out of firewood and that she could not cook. Her blunt replies mark a change in how she faces him: rather than speaking with her former fearful diffidence, she addresses him directly, with an icy composure and a stubbornness shaped by what she has endured. The winter’s deprivation thus becomes part of Hanka’s transformation from a vulnerable dependent into someone who accepts the work and responsibility before her without waiting for another person to take them on.

Poverty beyond one family

The crisis extends well beyond Hanka’s household. Around five families have no winter work in the village and have been waiting for the felling as if it might save them. Many residents have scarcely a grosz put by, and households are nearing the end of their potatoes. Poor laborers scrape together a living through whatever work they can find—threshing for farmers, wielding an axe at the mill, or taking other odd jobs—but this patchwork cannot protect everyone when employment disappears.

A group of residents gathers in cottages to discuss what to do. They first seek a leader among the village’s more established men, but Kłąb declines to go to the priest, citing his daughter’s betrothal, and others evade the task to protect their own interests. Bartek from the Sawmill, though he has work himself, stands with the poor. He and Filip from across the pond, Stach, Bylica’s son-in-law, Bartek Kozioł, and Walek go together to ask the priest to intercede with the squire. Their appeal shows both the limits of private effort and the need for collective advocacy when those who control employment can shut out the people who depend on it.

From deprivation to grievance

The poor villagers’ hardship becomes part of the wider resistance to the manor’s felling. When the forest conflict is publicly argued, Antek Boryna addresses farmers and hired hands together, linking the manor’s refusal to employ them with its continued pressure on the village and its decision to cut the forest. The crowd answers with calls to drive the workers off and stop the felling. For the laborers, the forest dispute is therefore inseparable from winter survival: the same decision that threatens the villagers’ claim to the woods also removes wages on which the poorest had relied.

The narrative sets that urgent need against the repeated indifference of better-off neighbors. Later, Hanka describes a starving girl in a freezing cottage, a family that has sold its quilt and must beg for groats, and a sick mother who has just given birth without milk or money. She observes that prosperous farmers worry over food or the interest they can charge, while the poor are left to divine care. Her account makes visible the daily consequences of a village order in which people live close together yet can remain untroubled by the hunger across a field boundary.

Spring does not immediately end the crisis. With the men imprisoned after the forest conflict, fields stand fallow just as the soil is ready for ploughing and planting. Women are left to manage livestock, children, household work, and farm labor, often while pregnant or exhausted. Hanka eventually returns to the farm and remembers hunger, grief, and Antek’s infidelities before recognizing that she is back on the land. Her return gives the hardship a concrete consequence and a limited resolution: she has regained a place from which she can work and care for her family, though the broader vulnerability of Lipce’s poor remains. Winter hunger in the village is thus both a material emergency and a measure of who bears the risks when work, land, and assistance are controlled by others.