“Because I feel like it!” replied he. “If you don’t like it, go and complain to the king!”
“But this road does not belong to the king, it belongs to our community!”
“That does not concern me either.”
With this the delegation was dismissed.
However, immediateily following their return homeward came a whole troop of Tukholian youths equipped with hatchets who calmly but efficiently chopped down the offending toll gate and made a bonfire of it not far from the boyar’s manor. The boyar raged back and forth in his yard like a maddened animal, cursing the dirty peasant louts but he did not attempt to stop them and for sometime afterwards did not endeavor to put up another toll gate.
Thus the first violation of their democratic principles, encroaching on their right to personal freedom, had been successfully resisted, but the people did not rejoice prematurely over this victory. They realized that this was probably only the prelude to other such infringements and attacks. And they were right, for it was not long before their suspicions were fully realized. One day their sheep-herdsmen came running into the village bringing somber tidings, that the boyar’s serfs had driven their herds away from the best communal pastures. Hardly had the herdsmen time to explain what had happened in detail when the community’s foresters came running also to report that the boyar was measuring and fencing off for himself a large portion of their forest. Again the community sent its delegation of representatives to Tuhar Wolf.
“Why are you trying to harm the people by taking from them what is theirs?”
“I am taking only that which my king has granted me.”
“But these are not the king’s lands, they belong to us! The king had no right to give away that which he does not own.”
57
