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Chapter 1

Religious Roots

Foundation in the “Forest Wilderness”

There is no single authoritative foundation story for Stavelot-Malmedy; the narrative was told in several different forms (charters, vitae, and even artwork) and changed over time. All of the stories are linked to the monastic attempt to define themselves in relation to others, and all connect spirituality and monastic activity directly to the landscape. There are many different versions of these narratives, and dealing with them as historical evidence is tricky territory. These legends cannot be viewed in the same way as knowable fact, and yet for the monks, and “as products of imaginative memory, monastic foundation legends belong in the realm of what was believed to be true, rather than what was seen to be fiction.”¹ Stavelot-Malmedy’s foundation stories do share common themes that are important to explore further: wilderness, solitude, physical and spiritual danger, and monastic leaders giving up power in order to pursue peace.

The first version of the foundation story is found in Sigibert III’s charter from ca. 648, which introduces a connection between local landscapes and an abstract idea of the desert. The king claimed the foundation of Stavelot-Malmedy for himself, reporting that he decided to build the two monasteries “in our forest called the Ardennes, in an empty place of solitude.” He added that the forest was a place “in which a throng of wild animals springs forth.”² Sigibert, supported by Grimoald, his mayor-of-the-palace, then carved out a zone of immunity—lands that would belong to the monasteries—making the houses the literal center of a landscape of administrative control. Thus, from the start the idea of the empty wilderness was imagined alongside the recognition of competing human interests in this territory. Finally, the royal protector of the monastic communities ordered that they were to remain undisturbed in their forest: “the custodians of those churches ought to be able to lead a quiet, regular, and contemplative life according to divine command.”³

Despite the king’s rhetorical and financial support for this monastic ideal of solitude, the “desert” was at heart intended to disconnect the monks from kings and other secular concerns. Solitude was a moral buffer; it implied the absence of dangerous secular concerns and the ability of the monks to be “undisturbed” in their religious goals. Though Sigibert’s charter suggests that their forest location placed the monks in danger from the wild animals inhabiting the area, this threat was very clearly counterbalanced by the absence of the moral threat posed by exposure to the secular world. The forest/desert allowed the monks to live in solitude, “guarding against the dangers to their souls and shunning the company of women… so that in the absence of the press of the people or of the tumultuous affairs of the world, they might be without anything but God alone.”⁴

Subsequent administrative documents perpetuated this idea of solitude. A charter from 652/653 again described the Ardennes as an “empty desert.”⁵ Around 744, King Childeric III referred to the Ardennes as a forest in which Stavelot and Malmedy sheltered a “host of many monks… seeking peace and tranquility.”⁶ This brings up another complex point when dealing with charters—whose interests, worldview, and language do charters reflect? Participants and recipients of charters could be just as active in their production as the king or his scribes. Karl Heidecker has pointed to a shift in studies of “sovereign charters” away from an “approach that sees charters mainly as expressions of royal issuers” and toward a reevaluation of the role of the recipient, “who also wanted the charter to express something.”⁷ These charters can thus be seen as the earliest expressions of a rhetoric of solitude that the monks of Stavelot-Malmedy created and maintained well into the twelfth century. Yet still other charters reveal the deep degree to which the monks were also concerned with the settled, secular aspects of monastic life in the Ardennes, recording numerous conflicts between the growing monastic populations and local communities. As a result, charters only rarely repeated such statements of isolation. Instead, over the next several centuries, the ideas of solitude were inherited and transformed by religious narrative sources.

Monastic Foundations in the Wilderness

As Remacle and the Merovingian foundation faded from living memory, the monasteries began to actively promote their founder and their own history. The first retelling of the monasteries’ early history was a biography or vita of St. Remacle, written around 850 (the vita prima).⁸ Its discussion of the monastic foundation in particular is based quite extensively on the early Merovingian charters. In language that itself feels like a diplomatic record, the vita describes King Sigibert and Grimoald (his mayor of the palace) as the initiators of the foundation. These nobles ensured that “through the will of God and the counsel of their optimati, the monasteries were built within the forest (forestis) located in the pagus called the Ardennes; [these monasteries] were named Stavelot and Malmedy, in which religious monks could stay and there spiritually serve Christ.”⁹ The anonymous author (a monk from Stavelot) then reported that only once the king had built and dedicated the church at Stavelot did he send for Remacle, who was then serving as the bishop of Tongres. Since it closely followed Sigibert’s charter, the vita prima depicts the foundation of Stavelot and Malmedy as an act of royal initiative, a reminder that monastic identities were not products of only monastic interests. Monarchs also had reasons to found and support monasteries, to control monastic reform and (as Stavelot’s history shows) choose monastic leaders.

According to this account, Remacle appears to have been a “starter abbot.” He originally intended to return to Tongres, but “after a very short time,” he “petitioned the king that he be allowed to relinquish his pontifical seat to his successor, so that, as he had long desired, he could go to this deserted space (eremus locus), and there, remote from men, [live] without anything but God.”¹⁰ By focusing on this decision, the author of the vita prima was able to begin the process of disassociating Stavelot and Malmedy from the royal mission and from episcopal oversight and linking them more closely to monastic goals and identity.

The author of the ninth-century vita prima was not simply inventing a Merovingian past; he instead converted the royal charter to serve monastic purposes. This can be seen in the way that the language reflects (though does not copy) that of the founding charter, for example in passages describing the donation of “twelve leugas” of land to the monastery.¹¹ Whereas the royal charter defines this act as an attempt to forestall conflict with other people, the vita prima reports that the boundary meant that within that area the monks would encounter no one. The author then explains that Remacle considered the site to be an empty place, a place of hermitage, where “having observed the flattering enticements of the world, [the monks] could live withdrawn from secular cares.”¹²

The promotion of the ideal of solitude is still found a century later in the vita Remacli, written in the late 900s by Heriger of Lobbes (d. 1007), who based his work on the charters and the vita prima and also made significant alterations to the narrative. Heriger, an active monastic leader who was perhaps also concerned about the growing tenth-century tensions between clergy and local lords, revived and perpetuated the solitude topos. He did this in part through descriptions of the environment as inhospitable and isolated. Stavelot was “confined by mountains,” and construction of buildings at Malmedy was “impeded by the swamps.” The idea of physical solitude was reinforced by the absence of people; local populations were “not fully established,” and there were only remnants of the former inhabitants, who had been “bound up in idolatry.” These unnamed people had constructed a hostile pagan landscape full of temples and effigies, and for Remacle and the monks, the ghostly presence of the former residents was as much a tangible obstacle as the swamps.¹³

Heriger’s vita also includes a discussion of Remacle’s earlier (failed) attempt at founding a monastery at Cugnon. As with Stavelot-Malmedy, the earliest mention of Cugnon is from a seventh-century royal charter, which reports that Sigibert III decided to found a regular monastery “in honor of our patrons Peter, Paul, John, and the other martyrs, in our lands, the silva Ardenense, at a place called Cugnon, surrounded by the Semois River.”¹⁴ Although the vita prima passes over the foundation of Cugnon in silence, the vita Remacli does mention it, noting that it was “a place that was seen to be well-suited for monastic life.”¹⁵ This ideal site “located in the harsh mountains” and “on the soil of the Ardennes” was surrounded by a river and “carved out of the rocks.”¹⁶ Both the charter and the vita, though written centuries apart, emphasize the location of the monastery—surrounded by a river and a forest, cut off from the secular world. But this proposed foundation appears never to have been actualized—only the single charter survives, preserved as a part of Stavelot-Malmedy’s records, and excavations have yielded no evidence of a monastic complex.¹⁷ Yet though the foundation failed, in the tenth century the place remained, according to Heriger, a “place of prayer.”¹⁸

Heriger also emphasized the importance of solitude in another of his works, the vita Hadalini, on a monastic founder who was a contemporary of Remacle’s. This work briefly describes the early history of Stavelot-Malmedy: “after [Remacle] had established his monasteries and had gathered monks to him, he built a great housing unit ideal for monastic use” where the monks could always follow “a life of prayer and solitude.”¹⁹ Remacle also instructed Hadalinus to build his own monastery, Chelles, “in the valley that is next to the forest (saltus) near the Letia river,” at a place called “between the four mountains.” Life there was predictably harsh; isolated by the mountains and the forest, Hadalinus cleared a space in this deserted landscape, working through hunger and thirst, in the cold and in utter poverty.²⁰ Thus, though the forest in its broadest sense provided isolation and protection, it could also be dangerous, and fit to be cleared and “converted” and used by the monks for their own purposes.

The association of Stavelot-Malmedy’s local landscape with physical and social isolation, so prominent in the foundation charter and the early legends, is still found during Wibald’s abbacy, another period of broader regional turbulence and monastic consolidation. There is a difference, however; whereas the earliest foundation stories explicitly presented the isolation of the forest/desert/wilderness as a means of perfecting monastic purpose, this idealization of the retreat was so ingrained by the twelfth century that Wibald was able to indicate this complex set of ideas in a type of rhetorical shorthand. Yet it is at this point that Stavelot-Malmedy was arguably the most connected to other parts of Europe and the world. Urbanization in the Low Countries, ties of local leaders to the internationalizing force of the crusades, participation in regional synods, and monastic bonds to a monarchy now centered to the West all exposed the houses to more people than ever before. A widely traveled and by no means isolated leader, Wibald nevertheless clearly associated isolation from the world with the ultimate goal of a religious life (though one he himself could not realize).

Wibald used the inherited tradition of woodland isolation as an extension of the desert in order to manipulate his readers into thinking of his noted absences as an extension of his larger commitment to the monastic ideal. For example, he used it to avoid a trip to Rome with Archbishop Arnold of Cologne. First, he noted, he had been busy with local political concerns. He also reminded Arnold of the danger of the trip to Rome; he himself had “often been thrown into incredible dangers” en route. Finally, he wrote that he would gladly meet Arnold in Saxony in late August, but at the present he was unwilling and unable to leave his isolated location. “With us being fixed in our ancient woodland solitude,” he wrote, “these pleasant religious duties rarely come to [our] attention.”²¹ Despite this isolation, in another letter Wibald told the bishop of Havelberg that if the papal chancellor were ever to demand his presence, he would drop everything to go to Rome and arrive “at his feet,” even if he had decided never again to visit Rome because he was “living in the most remote desert.”²²

The Value of Danger in the Landscape

A long-settled, mountainous, and forested region such as the Ardennes could in fact be a desert. Because of their relative separation from the royal court and urban life the monks could easily feel that, in the midst of a settled landscape, they lived in comparative isolation, and faced a dangerous wilderness. Heriger’s work provides another tie to the ancient desert wilderness: fear. In the vita Remacli, he reports that in the earliest stages of foundation, the monks were often frightened by the roars of unseen wild animals. Full of horror, they fled to Remacle, who told them that the animals were tied to the devil, and represented temptation. He explained that the devil was “like a lion in a cave,” lying in wait to deter men from their purposes, and that withstanding their fear of the animals would give them strength.²³

And there was real reason to fear the forest; the residents of the Ardennes and their livestock faced wild animals and human predators, groups that monastic sources unsurprisingly equated with one another. The real dangers faced by the monks and their dependents led to an escalated rhetoric of danger. Vito Fumagalli argued that terror in the face of forests and wild animals was a key part of medieval responses to nature. He called this the “landscape of fear,” arguing that early medieval culture was dominated by large, remote wildernesses and that “people were swallowed up in a countryside which was still largely untamed and had vast expanses of wilderness everywhere.” Perhaps too swept up in monastic language, he pictured the forest as a dynamic enemy to civilization, and “trees, bushes and undergrowth everywhere encroached on and smothered the ruins of long-deserted towns and villages.”²⁴

Danger did not deter the monks from seeking out the forest; danger was a draw. And from the moment they first appear in the historical record, the Ardennes are big, dark, and dangerous. In the first century b.c., Caesar described the “forest of the Ardennes, which is of great size”²⁵ as a dangerous and hostile landscape, dominated by dense trees, swamps, and thickets of underbrush broken only occasionally by small clearings and glens where farmers clung to a tenuous existence. Only narrow paths cut through the dense trees that hid enemies and prevented easy travel. He wrote that the Germans “had settled where a hidden valley or a wooded locality (locus silvestris) or an entangled morass offered some hope of defense or security,” and “the woods forbade the advance of any close-formed body [of troops] along the hidden and uncertain tracks.”²⁶ Tacitus explained that the Germans “plant themselves separately and individually at some favorite spring or plain or grove.” The Germans had “sacred woods and groves,” but the forests were also fortresses. Though he did not specifically discuss the Ardennes, like Caesar, he described the Northern forests as a protection for the Germanic warriors, sheltered by “ramparts of forest or river.”²⁷

These impressions of an imposing environment are not merely products of Mediterranean minds. The medieval Ardennes were in many ways similar to those of the modern period; one imagines that Caesar’s troops were often as miserable, frightened, and cold as those entrenched in the Battle of the Bulge. The landscape—dominated by steep mountains, dense forests, and rivers prone to flooding—could be a source of discomfort, fear, and even actual danger. For the Ardennes are rainy, foggy, and cold, with winds that race through the narrow river valleys. They can also be dangerously cold; Wibald’s correspondence includes a list of herbs from the Ardennes that were used as a medicinal treatment for chilblains, and the vita Popponis tells the story of a leper who risked dying of exposure. In the style of Martin, Poppo covered the man with his own cloak, after which the leper “sweated out” his leprosy.²⁸ The medieval sources bundle together descriptions of winter, darkness, and cold, all of which seem to outweigh other weather features. The Passio praised Agilolf for his ability to endure “many passions: hunger, vigils, cold, thirst, and the reproach of envy!”²⁹

The area around Stavelot is the coldest and wettest region in Belgium, and the early Middle Ages saw recurring “hundred year winters,” strong enough to kill people, trees, vines, and animals; create famines; freeze major European bodies of water; and trigger health crises. Stavelot’s annals record two of these: in 972 there was an unusually harsh winter, and 872 saw “a most severe winter, floods, an earthquake, and, in certain places, plagues of locusts.”³⁰ Other chronicles name 873 as the year with the worst of the weather: plagues of locusts preceded a winter that defied all expectations and experiences. Hincmar of Reims wrote that the winter was “long and strong, and the snow was spread about in a quantity such as no one could remember ever seeing.”³¹

Annalists in Xanten and Fulda also remembered 872, reporting that the summer was full of devastating storms. The author of the Translatio Quirini describes a night when “there were enormous winds, drenching rain, and the crash of thunder, from the morning to the sixth hour of the day.”³² The potential intensity of the weather is most clearly seen in the story of a storm so remarkable that it was recorded several times in miracle stories from Saint-Hubert. The first account, from about 850, describes a storm “So great that [its] monstrous fury… could not be satisfied except through the nearcomplete devastation of some of the nearby surrounding places.” Frightened for their immediate safety as well as their future livelihoods, the residents of the nearby village went to the monastery and the abbot led them in prayer at the saint’s tomb. When the prayers were finished, the author reports that “it happened that without any delay, the strength of the storm was then ended, and the darkness of the dense clouds, broken through by the radiant beams of the sun, was soon brightened.”³³

The second collection of Hubert’s miracles was written around 1050, and parallels but significantly rewrites the stories from the first collection, either expanding upon or reducing the amount of detail. The second description of the storm adds several significant details, including dating it to the year 837,³⁴ which suggests that the monks were interested in presenting this storm as a real historic event, with the hope that the story would resonate with other peoples’ own experiences and fears, perhaps also spurring them on to penitence and support of the saint. In this retelling, the storm is still associated with anger, but the religious message is even stronger. The storm is not personified; rather, the anger is attributed to God. “It so happened,” this version begins, “that the furious anger of divine punishment was raging, and the greatest weight of that fury was put on the areas surrounding Saint-Hubert.”³⁵

The association between uncontrollable weather and the will of God to punish or reward is a common theme in miracle literature. The ensuing description, however, is not generic, and instead seems to seek verisimilitude with the audience’s experiences: “so enormous were the torrential rainstorms and so ferocious the savagery of the storms, that it was enough [that the crop] was either torn out by the roots or weighted down to the ground, and because of the danger of hunger, death reached out menacingly to everyone.” Again, the story moves to the monastery, where the locals pray at the saint’s tomb, and “immediately, through the radiance of the sun, the torrent of the rains stopped, and for a long time afterwards, all of the different places suffered no damages from the storm.”³⁶

This description’s emphasis on agricultural damages is further suggestion that the monks were interested in presenting a miraculous world that paralleled their lived environment. Fears of hail- and thunderstorms during the Carolingian period were very real, and frequently linked to agricultural risk; the cereal crops typical of Northern Europe were vulnerable to this weather, and this fear often led to attempts to avoid or prevent storm damages.³⁷ The ninth century was also marked by an attempt by church leaders to show divine rather than human control of nature, and to redefine their authority in the wake of Carolingian reforms. And so the monks of Saint-Hubert invoked the type of storm that local groups in the Ardennes may have faced and dreaded, and then demonstrated that it could be both caused and stopped by God and his saint.

The miracles of Saint-Hubert also contain a second story about a sudden hailstorm that models how the monks imposed their own interpretations over natural phenomena. God could use nature to punish as well as protect. An army crossing through the Ardennes ransacked a village associated with Saint-Hubert: “when the horses sent out immoderately had destroyed the pastures, and the inhabitants, having lost any hope of being able to feed their own animals, had suffered, [the soldiers] did not leave them with only this pain; instead they also violently broke into their houses, and seized all of the foodstuffs that were inside them.” The soldiers then set up camp, and “the servants of the church petitioned their patron for help against this injury, and suddenly the covering heavens resounded terribly, and the greatest of storms bore down.”³⁸

The storm soon completely darkened the sky and a sudden downpour inundated the encamped army; the soldiers risked being swept away by the torrential rain, and “fleeing with their shields over their heads to prevent colliding with the hail stones, they were scattered.” The army had to beg forgiveness of the villagers and seek shelter in their houses, and as morning broke, they left “quickly and fearfully” only to discover that all but two of their horses had been killed in the storm. This miracle again ties a local storm to divine protection and allowed the monks of the Ardennes to link control of a wild and dangerous nature to monastic and saintly protection of an agricultural landscape.

Weather could also be associated directly with living saints. One of the best-known experiences of weather in the Ardennes is that of St. Lambert, the evangelizing bishop of Liège, who spent several years (from 674 to 681) in temporary exile at Stavelot. During one winter, Lambert stood nightly vigils, which were recorded in two hagiographical works, both of which emphasize the cold, wet winter nights that Stavelot’s monks routinely experienced. Lambert’s biographer noted that the saint penitently endured the weather, standing in front of the cross in the middle of the night, “naked and shuddering in the cold of winter.”³⁹ In the vita Remacli, Heriger claims that Lambert scorned the weather, standing in the middle of the night “saying psalms and prayers, in contempt of the cold and with his feet shod in snow.”⁴⁰ Though the barefoot penitent is of course a standard medieval image, this iteration of it became a fixture of Stavelot’s lore. Lambert’s life provided a model for withstanding the trials of nature. His death then became a reminder of the reason that dangerous landscapes were not only feared but also valued as a means of proving religious strength. Heriger wrote that in the end, Lambert’s spiritual excellence was signified by his “stormy martyrdom.”⁴¹

Danger and martyrdom were also part of most prominent monastic image of danger from the forest: wild animals. Wild animals were central to Sigibert’s 648 description of the Ardennes, retained their importance in Carolingian hagiography, and were still an active part of the monastic imagination in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Fear of these wild animals, both real and imagined, loomed large: in charters and hagiographical materials alike, readers encounter wolves, lions, bears, and unnamed wild beasts. There were many standard metaphors in Christianity that tied animals to moral, religious, and political ideas. These “animal exemplars” appeared in bestiaries, biblical commentaries, encyclopedias, and other writings. By discussing animals as part of Stavelot’s environmental imagination, I am not arguing that the monks were unique in equating wolves, lions, or sheep with people and moral ideas. It is important to recognize that they were building on, and at times elaborating on, a common well of imagery, and that these images recur frequently and vividly over five centuries of sources.⁴² My goal here is to explore the examples employed within this single set of sources, and, specifically, to show how these uses relate to the idea of wilderness and to fear of the forest environment.

The presence of wild animals, both dangerous and docile, was one of the hallmarks of medieval forests; bears, wolves, boar, beaver, deer, squirrels, and many other animals dwelled in the forests, using the trees as shelter and the rivers and glades for nourishment, part of what has been described as an early medieval world of “vigorous animality.”⁴³ Archaeology reinforces textual impressions; in the Ardennes, excavations have yielded remains from deer, roe deer, boars, foxes, and possibly aurochs. A single deposit at Wellin, inhabited as early as A.D. 650, produced bones from boar, deer, roe deer, fox, and sparrow-hawk.⁴⁴

No wolf bones have been excavated in the Ardennes, and there are no medieval records of wolf numbers for the region, but comparative evidence suggests that the medieval Ardennes would have sheltered many wolves.⁴⁵ Charlemagne’s wolf-hunters were given instructions in the capitulary De Villis, and a bishop of Metz wrote to the emperor, boasting about killing more than a hundred wolves.⁴⁶ Whatever their actual numbers, wolves dominated the imagination of the monks of Stavelot (even though in this period, the direct link between Remacle and the wolf that is celebrated today was not yet established). In part, this discrepancy is due to a broader human fear of wolves that is unconnected to the degree of threat they pose. Wolves rarely attack people. Instead, as Jon Coleman has argued, because they pose a threat to sheep, deer, and the human use of animal resources, they are perceived as dangerous and monstrous.⁴⁷ Because wolves were imagined to be a threat, the monks told vivid stories of actual and metaphoric wolves attacking people and threatening the monastic lifestyle.

The vita Popponis (ca. 1060), for example, includes a detailed story of a wolf attack. Its author (or authors—see handlist) ascribes a malicious intent to the wild animal, invoking the fear that people, daily exposed to danger, might have had of the randomness of the wilderness. “Behold!” the author commanded, “a wolf, then thirsting for human blood made an attack from out of the dark forest haunts, and violently seized a shepherd who had been grazing his flock in the area and dragged him by his defenseless neck to a distant place that was fit for his foul desires.”⁴⁸ Unfortunately, the search party sent out into the swamps arrived too late, and they were “unable find any traces of life in the man, nor did they see the wolf anywhere.”⁴⁹

The sources from Stavelot abound with saints and abbots described as shepherds protecting the flocks of the faithful from spiritual danger, represented by wolves. Sometimes, these messages are cursory and abbreviated, such as Wibald’s request for papal support, “lest the errant sheep be torn apart in the jaws of the wolves.”⁵⁰ But some of the sources elaborate on the theme, highlighting the ferocity of the wolves and the flexibility of biblical images. In the vita Remacli, Heriger invented dying words for the saint, who tells his monks, “I fear for you, lest, if the rapacious wolves were to come at you, there would be no one who could repel them from you.”⁵¹ Heriger also wrote that monks, “the most brave fighters for Christ, not wishing to be bound fast inside the peace of the cloister, spring forward, lain bare, into the field of battle; so that they might not be made deserters from the spiritual battle, nor be like mercenaries fleeing at the sight of a wolf.”⁵²

Wibald acknowledged that the wolf was a metaphor for danger, fear, and even the wilderness. During a period in which he was struggling with maintaining three houses, and wrapped up in several political struggles, Wibald described the many problems and dangers faced by the church of Stavelot. Mixing his metaphors, he wrote: “We saw therefore not one single wolf approaching (unless perhaps we recognize one wolf as the entire phalanx of demons) but countless armies of many wolves, which were holding their gaping mouths open with wild rage for the purpose of devouring the church of Stavelot and the greater part of Lotharingia. But God sent the holy spirit from the heavens and closed the mouth of the lion.”⁵³ Of course, these examples draw on common Christian associations of religious care and leadership with the guardianship of a shepherd over his flock. However, these passages, like sections of vitae that contain quotations of other Christian works, cannot be ignored or eliminated as derivative. Although some biblical citations were arguably archaisms or citations of older ideas perhaps no longer relevant, the Bible was a living and vibrant part of contemporary medieval culture and a source that could be used by medieval writers at will to express numerous and often conflicting ideas. Though a universal symbol, the wolf was clearly meaningful for the monks, as they chose to use it in many different contexts. There were many older religious and literary images that could be borrowed or employed by medieval writers, and it is worth paying attention to the monks’ selection and frequent use of this particular metaphor.

And the wolf was an exceptionally good metaphor. The wolf represented alien threats and dangers. Bestiaries, which became increasingly prominent in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries but were based on earlier works, reported that the wolf was “a ravenous beast, and thirsts for blood.” The wolf was, moreover, “the devil, who is always envious of mankind, and continually prowls round the sheepfolds of the Church’s believers, to kill their souls and corrupt them.”⁵⁴ In a tense exchange between Wibald and Robert, the deacon of Stavelot at a moment of crisis, the wolf became the vehicle for airing fears and criticisms. Robert, urging Wibald not to abandon the monastery, chided him that “a wolf having been seen, a good pastor would never abandon his pastoral office.”⁵⁵ Wibald responded to this direct challenge, taking up the metaphor and extending it: “As to that which you wrote, moreover, because ‘a wolf having been seen, a good pastor would never abandon his pastoral office,’ your experience ought to recall how many, how great, what savage wolves [I] have pulled down while being in charge of Stavelot these past twenty years, which I have borne up not without the risk of mortal danger, grave scandals, and reproach.” He then added that (in part because of the political complexity of his assumption of control of Corvey), he could not serve only Stavelot, “since wolves are not lacking in the church of Corvey, and a pastor who is both present and vigilant is also necessary there.”⁵⁶ This is but one of many times that Wibald felt that he was spread too thin, as seen in his comment that “pulled in many directions, I hold the wolf by the ears.”⁵⁷

The wolf also represented the perceived boundary between men and animals. When Poppo heard of the shepherd attacked by the wolf, he was mortified by the violence of the attack, and prayed to God for the life of “this man who was made in your image and likeness [and] is now the prey of a wolf.”⁵⁸ In the Miracula Remacli, the existence of this divide is reinforced by its transgression. In a sign of divine displeasure and disorder, “wolves and bears had been violently breaking into the city of Vienne, devouring many people throughout the entire year.”⁵⁹ Wild animals threatened human life and violated the established border between the wilderness and civilization. Bestiaries from the twelfth century help provide insight into the interpretive context of such comments, connecting Stavelot-Malmedy’s sources to wider monastic ideas. Wolves represented a boundary of sorts between the wild and the domestic, as some bestiaries include discussions of how the wolf “loses its wildness” to become doglike. Additionally, in at least one bestiary, the dog is the animal that follows the description of the wolf.⁶⁰

Powerful as such monastic images are, it is important to remember that the forests were filled not only with animals, but also with people. The frequent association of the ferocity of wild animals with danger carried over into representations of humans who posed danger to the monasteries as having beastly characteristics. As but one example of many, the eleventh-century Passio describes the enemy guards who kill Agilolf as animals gnashing their teeth and thirsting for blood.⁶¹ Aside from the spiritual danger of general consort with society, expressed in the desire for isolation, the monks faced specific threats from inimical people. The forest did not create true isolation, but its relative isolation from the main routes to larger communities and justice encouraged both planned and spontaneous criminality.

This was clearly linked to the main dichotomy of monastic settlement; though the monks strove to build in sites that were or appeared to be geographically isolated, the growing houses were closely tied to the local and regional economic framework and were wealthy and well endowed. This made monasteries prime targets for both minor and major theft, and the monastic concern with this is reflected in a multitude of stories. The Ardennes were crossed by several major roads, but since there were only a handful of options, and since these roadways were often flanked by forests or other inhospitable environments, travelers were vulnerable. Interestingly, many of these examples cluster around the year 1000, perhaps reflecting the possibility that Ardennes houses were affected by the increasing criminality that led to the Peace of God movement.

One case of highway crime in the Ardennes was immortalized in the tenth-century vita of saint Evermarus (d. ca. 700), who was killed near Tongres on his way to visit Remacle’s tomb at Stavelot. Allegedly, a brigand stopped Evermarus on the road, chased him through the forest, and killed him and his companions. Their bodies were then found by one of King Pippin’s royal hunters and buried in a woodland chapel. Two centuries later, the relics were translated, which occasioned the composition of the vita.⁶² The rigors and dangers of travel are also found in the eleventh-century Translatio Quirini, whose author wrote that the monks suffered exhaustion and hunger on the road, surviving storms and “extending many efforts, and also enduring as many thieves and fears of the road.”⁶³

One morning the monks took to the road amidst a gathering of exultant locals. But, “they had scarcely traveled four milia before their rejoicing turned into sorrow.”⁶⁴ Having heard a rumor that the monks were carrying worldly riches along with the relics, some men “all conspired as one to seize violently the monastic treasures.” But the would-be thieves, “inspired by devilish purposes,” were foiled by God, who “sent amongst them such a great fog that they were separated from one another and in no way able to succeed.” Though in this case the sudden appearance of a fog protected the monks, the story shows how weather and landscape could create spaces for evildoing; had it not been a divine boon, the blanket of fog might just as easily have allowed the thieves to act with impunity. The author directly compares this event to one of the great desert miracles of the flight from Egypt, adding that “using the fog as a servant, [God] saved [our] patron from the midst of an enemy people.” Invoking Egypt was not unexpected: the twelfth-century life of St. Bernard of Tiron equates the European forest explicitly with the biblical wilderness: “But there were in the border region between Maine and Brittany vast wildernesses (regionis vaste solitudines) which at that time flourished like a second Egypt with a multitude of hermits.”⁶⁵

The later compositional phases of the Miracula Remacli, composed around 1040 during Poppo’s abbacy, contain numerous examples of thieves (who were, of course, ultimately caught through the saint’s intervention). Some of the thefts were of animals and agricultural products, but in other cases, more valuable goods were stolen. Some crimes took place on the road, for example when people bringing tithes to the monasteries were attacked en route. Other crimes occurred in the monasteries, as was the case when a cleric arrived at Stavelot as a newcomer. This stranger, the author claims, went to the monastery specifically to win the monks’ trust and rob them of their treasures. This man purportedly chose Stavelot because “the very solitude of the monastery aided him.”⁶⁶ The miraculous protection of the monks against theft may also be connected to eleventh-century critiques of monastic wealth associated with monastic reforms.

Several of the hagiographical sources present the forests of the Ardennes as a shelter or haven for not just thieves, but also enemy troops. At Stavelot, this theme seems to have developed primarily as a response to the ninth-century Viking raids. The second book of the Miracula Remacli presents the Vikings as immoral, pestiferous, and a form of divine punishment. One of the compilers wrote that “our wickedness, I believe… called down God’s scourge.” He then described how the Vikings prepared a great fleet, came to France, and put the entire region to the flames. They then swept across the Mosel and “burst forth into the forest of the Ardennes” where everything became “the barbarians’ prey.”⁶⁷

Finally, the Vikings approached Stavelot in the cover of darkness, creeping up through the forests. The Miracula present the subsequent events as a study in the contrast between the light and dark (and good and evil). “The assault was raging in the dead of night,” the author notes, and the frightened monks went out into the night, blinded by the stormy darkness. The power of the darkness to harm the monks and aid their enemies was palpable, yet at almost the same time, the voice of God said, “because the twisted thing hates the light being carried about, this is your hour.” When the monks, bearing Remacle’s body, reached a nearby mountain called the Alnos, they rested. A miraculous column of fire descended on the spot, and the relics started to glow “like the moon.” Suddenly the monks felt as if they were basking “under summer’s light” and hot steam warmed up the winter night.⁶⁸ This divine light protected the monks, and was a direct contrast to the dark forests that protected the Vikings.

Stavelot was not alone in this; Regino of Prüm’s tenth-century chronicle also discusses the role that the Ardennes played in the Viking attacks. He reported that in 882 the Vikings traveled through the Ardennes and attacked Prüm for three days. His account of the subsequent attack on Prüm in February 892 describes how the Vikings moved through the woods to approach and attack the monastery. The entire congregation, including the abbot, fled. After their sudden appearance out of the forest, the Vikings “destroyed everything, killed a few of the monks, slaughtered the greater part of the servants, and made the rest captives.”⁶⁹ Then they returned into the forest, where they destroyed newly constructed fortifications. Regino also described an attack in which the Vikings disappeared “into the woods and swamps next to the palace at Aachen.”⁷⁰ The ability of the Viking groups to travel, unimpeded, through the forests and surprise the monks is presented as a clear reason to fear the local landscape. According to another legend, the monks of Saint-Omer even once cleared an entire forest because they feared that their attackers would be able to use it to sneak up on the monastery.⁷¹

Although of arguably little lasting material importance, the Viking raids remained present in monastic imagination, and the fear of barbarian attack remained part of monastic rhetoric and reality for the next century. Then, in 954 the Hungarians swept down through the Ardennes and attacked Malmedy. This renewed threat of external attack and the constant presence of warring and feuding local powers served to keep the fear expressed in the Miracula Remacli ever-present, and later monastic enemies would be depicted in language similar to the reports of the Vikings. The forest, where wild animals, armed men, and even the devil lurked in the darkness, could be a frightening place where monks faced physical and spiritual dangers. The monks lived in a natural setting that, though potentially dangerous, was also nurturing and life-bringing. The monks experienced both hardship and beauty in their forests.

Wibald’s letters include the proverb “if it is cold, sit in front of the fire; if it is hot, under the shade.”⁷² Life in the Ardennes was full of natural opposites: cold and heat, winter and summer, wild and domestic, day and night—but God and the saints could overcome the natural boundaries between these opposite conditions. At one of the places where Quirin’s relics rested on their trip to Malmedy, “the grass kept its greenness eternally; it was neither burned by summer’s heat nor taken away by winter’s freeze.”⁷³ And on the cold winter night of the Viking attack, the saint glowed like the summer.

Defining the Medieval Forest: Waste, Resource, or Wilderness?

The monks used images of isolation and danger to construct an idea of the forest as a desert wilderness where they could struggle to shape their identity. Most of this wilderness idea was based on the construction of a space free of people; yet the dangers posed by enemies and criminals suggest that even this idea needed a foil. Without people to avoid, the idea of the forest as solitude lost much of its force. The forest was a site of temptation, after all, and as the monks came in contact with the secular world, they added new stories to those of the forest as desert. It should therefore not come as a surprise that when we shift from the miraculous to the mundane, we are faced with both a similar range of ways of describing and discussing forested landscapes and a struggle over whether forests were wasteland or useful. The saltus, for example, is often seen as a no-man’s-land, linking it (and subsequently most forest and woodland words) into the discussion of the “forest wilderness.” Wilderness (medieval and otherwise) is a concept that stretches past settlement questions or aesthetics into issues of ownership and legal status, and discussion of use of “marginal” or “waste” lands is central to the legal, political, and proprietary discussions of the history of woods and wilderness.

The blurring of several ways of seeing forests led to the development of multiple sets of vocabulary to describe forests as place, resource, and even as abstract idea. There are numerous Latin terms that were used during the Middle Ages that denoted, to some extent, forests or woodlands, including silva, nemus, saltus, boscus, and waldus. The sources from Stavelot and Malmedy contain several of these: saltus, nemus, and, most commonly, silva and forestis. Stavelot-Malmedy’s charters also apply forest words flexibly—even at times casually. The range and interchangeability of these words suggests that for the medieval participants, the choice of words was not determined solely by strict technical or legal definitions. In Stavelot’s early documents, labeling words did not have precise, legal definitions, and could be substituted readily for one another in similar contexts. This discouraged the development of concrete, universal definitions for forests and woodlands, and instead encouraged medieval writers to develop other ways to describe them.

Though much effort has been spent trying to pin it down, the exact relationship between these words remains elusive and ambiguous. Forest historians interested in ecological and landscape history have tried to find ways of differentiating between medieval words in an attempt to ascertain the degree of medieval forest cover. Others focusing on the study of charters and other legal documents expect (and want) to find a legal precision in words. Both of these directions privilege precision and work to avoid or clarify ambiguities in the written record. Yet I think the ambiguities need to be better understood on their own as reflections of the fact that forests and woodlands served many interests. Medieval forest vocabulary is mutable, nuanced, and ambiguous due to several different competing forces that are worth notice: local particularism versus state-sponsored standardization, official chancery language versus literary Latin, legal precision versus rhetorical aims, and even noble interest in hunting versus monastic interest in supporting an agrarian economy.

It is the broader contexts of sources that provide the meaning, not just the specific terms themselves. Even in charter contexts, “technical” words could be manipulated and substituted and rearranged. In charters, other phrases and additional qualifiers were used to add specificity, and in narrative sources flexible vocabulary could be used to enhance metaphors, blur boundaries between different ideas about forests, and provide variety of tone. Acknowledging that forest words could lack precision can also make us more comfortable dealing with a similar lack of specificity in medieval concepts of the “definition” and “value” of resources and landscapes.

In part because of the importance of England’s Forest Law and of modern ideas of state-sponsored forestry, scholars of medieval legal and woodland history have tried to work out precise meanings for forest terms (especially forestis) and to construct a history of their legal applications.⁷⁴ There are certainly contexts in which medieval terminology had legal, definite, and precise meanings, and this is an important aspect to understanding the development of medieval states, languages, and economies. Yet it is also important to recognize that not all terms had legal precision at all times or in all contexts.

As has been pointed out in recent studies of vocabulary relating to castles, the imprecision of some medieval vocabulary could be a strength, allowing an ambiguity of meaning to reflect flexibility of practice and experience. In his revisionist approach to castle history, Matthew Johnson pointed out that the “search for a tight definition or classification of species or subspecies of form is unhelpful. There is no one essential category of ‘castle.’ It was a fluid idea in the medieval mind.”⁷⁵ This fluidity and uncertainty is not always something we’re comfortable with when we encounter it in medieval history, yet it is present throughout the sources: “it is not only medieval notions of space that are characterized by imprecision and approximation. As we shall see, time was measured in an even more capricious way. In general, with regard to quantitative terms—measures of weight, capacity, numbers of people, dates, etc.—arbitrariness and imprecision were the norm.”⁷⁶ When exploring chestnut production in Italy, Paolo Squatriti noted that records of the practice show “the inappropriateness of applying to it rigid classical agronomical and legal categories like ‘ager,’ ‘saltus,’ and ‘silva,’ or even the more modern historiographical distinction between ‘incolto’ and ‘coltivato.’”⁷⁷

For a few of the forest words, flexibility of use dates to the classical period. Silva was a classical term that carried over to the Middle Ages, and could be applied broadly to many types of natural and managed woodlands. It was the “most generally-used word for woods,”⁷⁸ and therefore more specialized vocabulary also developed during the classical and medieval periods that incorporated and adapted the word silva. These more exact woodland terms included: silva caedua, coppice woods; silva glandifera, oak-acorn forest; and silva pascua, woodland pasture. During the classical period, silva also had mixed cultural meanings. Sometimes it represented chaos, or disordered matter, and at other times it was associated with pastoralism, highlighting one of the chief features of woodland and forest vocabulary: a literary, legal, and cultural flexibility of meaning, use, and application.⁷⁹

Despite its flexibility, silva was indisputably associated with features of the natural world. This is not the case with saltus, a classical term associated with both geographical and legal ideas. Heinrich Rubner defined the Roman saltus as land that (though often wooded) was characterized by its legal status as a “res nullius” or no-man’s land on which civilians could hunt freely.⁸⁰ Josef Semmler echoed Rubner’s claim for a jurisdictional definition of saltus: “The late antique saltus excluded no one: everyone was allowed to hunt large and small game, and to catch birds and fish.”⁸¹ And Chris Wickham defined saltus as a land that “could be hunted over by anyone.”⁸² Such definitions evoke Georges Duby’s optimistic statement that “the forest in the early Middle Ages had been a bottomless reservoir open to all, in which every man could plunge according to his needs.”⁸³

Yet saltus was also associated with woods, and with the word silva. By the early Middle Ages, Isidore of Seville (whose works were found in Stavelot’s library) defined saltus as “vast, wooded (silvestria) areas, where trees leap up to the heights.”⁸⁴ Despite Isidore’s eloquent topographic definition, saltus has continued to be studied primarily as it relates to legal rights and limits during the classical and Late Antique periods, and how those might have been transferred over to the Middle Ages.

Fluidity of vocabulary can be seen when the many different descriptions of the Ardennes are compared. The Ardennes were not consistently defined or labeled in Stavelot’s charters (a body of sources where some precision of terms might be expected). This is not due simply to changing chancery practice: Sigibert’s chancery issued three charters to the monasteries, and in these the Ardennes are labeled as forestis, saltus, and silva.⁸⁵ Richard Keyser has pointed out a similar “triple synonymy” for the Orthe, which appears “as alternatively the silva, nemus, or foresta of Orthe.”⁸⁶ The earliest of Sigibert’s Ardennes charters, from 644, makes a direct claim to royal ownership through the phrase “terra nostra silva Ardenense.”⁸⁷ In 648 the Ardennes are both a “foreste nostra nuncupate Arduinna,” and a saltus. Finally, a charter from 652/3 labels the Ardennes as neither silva nor forestis, instead using the phrase the “great solitude of the Ardennes” (vasta heremi Ardenensis).⁸⁸ In the twenty subsequent references to the Ardennes that are found in Stavelot-Malmedy’s pre-1158 charters, they are labeled as a silva, a saltus, a fundus, a pagus, a comitatus, and a fiscus. In the broader record, René Noël noted that before the year 1000, the Ardennes was described as a “forêt” (he does not distinguish between silva and forestis—perhaps like some medieval authors) either twenty-one or twenty-two times, and as a saltus five times.⁸⁹

Most famous of these is Sigibert’s 648 charter, which famously notes that Stavelot-Malmedy was established in foreste nostra nuncupante Arduinna, or “in our forest that is called the Ardennes.” The charter also describes the Ardennes as a deserted place “in which a host of wild animals sprouts forth,” which has been connected to the royal interest in hunting.⁹⁰ But wild animals were not only of royal interest—they were just as much a part of the monastic imagining of the forest. This reminder of multiple authorship of charter evidence further warns against an attempt to view charter vocabulary only as applied, state-sponsored language. Language not only could shift over time and in different contexts, but could also be used and appropriated by different groups, sometimes in spite of the intentions of the original author or speaker.

The most problematic of medieval forest and woodland terms is forestis.⁹¹ The importance that has been placed on attempting to define forestis is based in part on the fact that the term appears to have been created during the early Middle Ages. Because it occurs generally (but not exclusively) in legal sources, it is often interpreted as a medieval legal invention. The earliest provable use of the term is from Sigibert’s 648 charter. Sönke Lorenz recently argued for a rehabilitation of two earlier charters (once suspected to be forgeries) that could contain earlier uses of the word forestis.⁹² The related word forestarius also made its first recorded appearance in a charter issued to Stavelot. In 670, Childeric II gave a part of the royal forestis to the monks, and the forestarii were forbidden to violate monastic rights within that zone.⁹³

Forestis circulated quickly through the Merovingian chanceries, and during the first centuries of its use, the word appears mainly, though not exclusively, in royal charters and diplomas. As Lorenz points out, at least one Merovingian vita contains the word forestis.⁹⁴ Yet in some ways this is still a “charter” usage, since the vita records a donation to the monastery by Dagobert’s widow. The author likely had access to a royal charter, the language of which he adopted in his own work (just as the Carolingian author of the vita prima transferred the word forestis from Sigibert’s charter into his work). Such transmissions of language and vocabulary between source genres highlights the fact that even though specific words might have had a clear meaning to one group or in a certain context, their use and appropriation by others during the Middle Ages could blur legal or technical meanings.

General consensus among modern scholars is that forestis “is not a natural fact” and is instead a term of ownership (particularly royal) connected to hunting and game rights.⁹⁵ F. Vera adds that “there is some agreement that the concept of ‘forestis’ applies to the wilderness in general and to trees, forest, shrubs, wild animals, water and fish in particular,” and that all of this belonged to the king.⁹⁶ Heinrich Fichtenau concluded that this was “an institution, stretched not only over woodlands, but also over wasteland and rivers, whose hunting zones and fisheries were opened up only to the lord for pasturage, etc.”⁹⁷ This emphasis on hunting rights has also led to an attempt to disassociate the forestis from the trees; Richard Hayman even wrote that the term “defined a place of deer rather than a place of trees.”⁹⁸ Chris Wickham offered a definition of forestis that best expresses this consensus: “‘forest’ is not a woodland, or not necessarily.” “The history of the term,” he wrote, linking forest with royal rather than monastic identity, “is, in fact, nothing other than the history of the development of exclusive hunting reserves for kings and, later, nobles.”⁹⁹

This prevailing assumption that although a forestis might have had trees they were in no way a defining feature has been challenged, however, often on the basis of the Stavelot evidence. In the 1950s, Rudolf Schützeichel argued that the foundation charter of Stavelot-Malmedy, with its emphasis on the natural characteristics of the Ardennes, proves that during its earliest phases, forestis was a synonym for silva.¹⁰⁰ Lorenz drew on the Stavelot evidence to argue that in its earliest Merovingian and Carolingian uses, forestis developed to describe wooded properties. There was a “territorial character to forestis as an area clearly defined and in all cases covered with woods and waters.”¹⁰¹ Most recently, Keyser claims that in France after the ninth century, forestis “gradually became almost synonymous with silva, designating wooded land, albeit a treed space under lordly control.”¹⁰² Despite such compelling arguments for the inclusion of woodland features into at least the earliest phases of the history of the word, forestis is still traditionally defined not as a geographic term, but as a word denoting ownership and privilege.

Forestis has been chiefly defined as “an area under the king’s law”¹⁰³ and as tied to concepts of “legal delimitation, the prohibition, the reserved usage.”¹⁰⁴ This has a deep history: in his 1909 study of Merovingian and Carolingian charters, Hans Thimme concluded that forestis was a purely legal definition that had little, if anything, to do with woods, woodland activities, or even hunting.¹⁰⁵ In a 1964 article, Heinrich Rubner concluded that Roman law saw the saltus as an unclaimed or unowned property (a waste land or a “res nullius”), but that forestis reflected a sense of exclusive control over hunting rights.¹⁰⁶ In 1989, Wickham wrote that on the Continent in the 600s through 800s, forestis was always associated with royal possession and legal restriction.¹⁰⁷ In such definitions, the creation of forestes becomes an official, regularized, and imposed state process.

Although we must be wary of applying later meanings of forestis to the earlier uses of the term, it appears that the Carolingian kings made a distinct effort to use the term in a regularized manner. The Merovingian forestis may not have been exclusively tied to royal power, but by the end of the ninth century the Carolingian kings had largely succeeded in transforming the word into a technical and legal word. As Schützeichel explained, “the legal sense of forestis was already well-developed, and the term was being broadly used as a terminus technicus in charters.”¹⁰⁸

This evolution of usage can be compared with the history of another well-known medieval term, mansus. Recent work has suggested that mansus and forestis might both have been part of attempts by the Carolingian government to regularize a formerly varied or mutable term, and to apply it uniformly to a diverse set of geographic and agricultural zones. Christopher Sonnlechner argued that mansus could be used in many contexts to present a “homogenized” view of land-holding.¹⁰⁹ This process bears striking similarities to those explored by James C. Scott, who points out that modern states “took exceptionally complex, illegible, and local social practices, such as land tenure customs or naming customs, and created a standard grid whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored.”¹¹⁰

Carolingian uses of both mansus and forestis seem to show an administrative attempt to control and regularize record-keeping and legal terminology. Yet although the role of official, bureaucratizing forces during the early Middle Ages is clear, giving too much prominence to the Carolingian “State” also runs the risk of exaggerating the centralizing ability of early medieval monarchs, and deemphasizing the roles of other participants. Matthew Innes described this in a way that invokes Carolingian uses of the forest: “When scholars have gone hunting Carolingian government, they have had a clear idea of the kind of beast they were tracking: a hazy silhouette, glimpsed from afar, but recognizably of the same species as the modern state.… Tracking a beast resembling the modern state, they have returned empty handed, unable even to point to a strong scent or a footprint.”¹¹¹

This is particularly important in the context of Stavelot’s early Merovingian charters (which are those containing the term forestis), whose most recent editor has argued were perhaps not even the product of the Merovingian chancery to whom they were attributed, but instead either produced by Grimoald or a monastic writer.¹¹² Though I would not go as far as Innes in dismissing comparisons between early medieval and modern governments, it is important to remember that the medieval state was never the sole controller of written records. Other actors also influenced words and meaning, through direct intervention, later interpolation, or even outright forgery.¹¹³ This led to a cacophony of competing written voices and to complex and widely scattered networks of chanceries and scriptoria. The vagaries (and deliberate manipulations) of charter preservation are also important to pay attention to, especially since the survival of early medieval charters that include the term is scattered and random. Furthermore, the earliest uses of the term forestis survive only in copies. Forestarii appears in an original charter from 707, but the earliest surviving original charter to use the term forestis is from 717.¹¹⁴ Therefore all attempts to define what the term meant during the first several centuries of its use must acknowledge the holes in the manuscript record, later substitution by Carolingian copyists, and even forgery.

A literal example of this is a ninth-century charter issued by Zwentibold, who created a forestis from woodlands previously belonging to the abbey of St. Maximin in Trier. The manuscript, which has been the object of much linguistic debate, has a lacuna where a word was never filled in: “ut quandam silvam in pago Treverensi in bannum mitteremus et ex ea, sicut Franci dicunt, ________ faceremus.”¹¹⁵ If this spot should contain the term forestis, it allows for the intriguing possibility that the word may not have been a legal term per se but instead an “ethnic” term like “gualdus/waldus” that resulted from the blending of Latin and Germanic tongues.¹¹⁶ Another manuscript from the 800s also points in this direction. Louis the Pious issued a charter to a royal forester named Ado, who served in the Vosges. This charter was copied into a handbook in the classical shorthand of Tironian notes, but there were a few words for which the scribe had no notational abbreviations, including forestarius and forestem, which he wrote out in full.¹¹⁷

Many historians invoke the first appearance of forestis in Stavelot-Malmedy’s foundation charter and make bold claims from this about the nature of the word. Yet almost none have discussed the other forest words that are found in that same charter, or set the 648 charter in the context of other charters issued by Sigibert to Remacle. It is also important that although modern scholars are fascinated with the term, forestis was used very rarely in Stavelot-Malmedy’s sources. Of the sixty-eight reported forests or woodlands (excluding the Ardennes) from Stavelot-Malmedy’s pre-1158 charters, only seven are labeled as forestes. Except for in the vita prima, which used the foundation charter as a template, the monks of Stavelot themselves never used the word forestis, and it disappears from Stavelot-Malmedy’s charters after around 950.¹¹⁸ One place name includes the word nemus, and five charters contain no name for the property but describe woodland uses or produce. The remaining instances all use variations on the term silva, many of which provide contextual details that make distinctions about woodland use and properties. This parallels results from the Belgian CETEDOC project. In their set of 183 sources written before the year 1000, the word silva appears fifty-seven separate times (with another ten occurrences of the related silvestris) and saltus twenty-seven times, whereas forestis is found only eight times and foresta only once.¹¹⁹ Given its relative scarcity, it is possible that too much attention has been given to forestis at the expense of a more complete discussion of other woodland terms.

Furthermore, the 648 charter itself is not consistent when using forest words. Although Sigibert’s first use of forestis supports the association with royal ownership, it is just prologue. One important contextual point not raised in discussions that focus on legality is that when Sigibert’s scribes reached the legally binding portion of the charter—the actual donation of property—the word forestis was dropped. Sigibert gave the monks twelve milia of land from the neighboring saltus. Yet in the very next sentence, the donated portion of the saltus is referred to as ipsam forestem.¹²⁰ Throughout the charter, forestis and saltus are used quite literally interchangeably. Sönke Lorenz, who is the only scholar to have used both the entire charter and other Stavelot charters when analyzing forestis, argued that this inconsistency (along with the description of the Ardennes) is proof that the term forestis, at its inception, was equivalent with silva and designated a woodland.¹²¹

The very few uses of the term forestis inhibit a meaningful survey of changing context or meaning. Nevertheless, some general trends are worth noting. It appears that the uses of the term forestis in Stavelot’s charters were all connected to contexts that included a focus on ownership or control of properties or with attempts to limit, bound, or label property or boundaries. Properties that included or were labeled as forestes continued to appear among the monasteries’ holdings after the initial foundational grants. In addition to the larger Ardennes, the monasteries’ holdings included parts of at least five other properties that were labeled as forestes. A forestis above the Amblève was part of a designation of the monasteries’ boundaries.¹²² Three forestes (Wulfsbusch, Fanias, and an unnamed forestis) appear as portions of a boundary clause from a royal charter.¹²³

The overwhelming majority of uses of forestis from Stavelot and Malmedy’s documents come from royal charters, thus supporting the association with the royal court.¹²⁴ Yet royal rights to woodlands apparently existed without the label of forestis. This includes the common royal use of the phrase silva nostra, which claims direct royal control and ownership without using the term forestis, or legal concepts such as the “royal ban.” The properties granted to Cugnon included one unnamed silva dominica and the forest of Orgeo, described by Sigibert as silva nostra.¹²⁵

The charters of Stavelot-Malmedy also support Rubner’s argument that forestis and saltus may have been equivalent. The 648 foundational charter uses the two words interchangeably. Thirty years later, another royal charter (HR 10) also used both terms. Saltus again appeared alongside forestis in a 1089 royal charter. This confirmation of earlier acts may reflect the ambiguity of the 648 charter, as it too records that the monasteries of Stavelot and Malmedy had been built “within our forestis in the saltus of the Ardennes.”¹²⁶ This close association of forestis to saltus helps to draw links more directly to the words’ geographical or topographical associations, and their connection (at least in early centuries) to silva, since Isidore of Seville clearly associated saltus with trees.¹²⁷

Largely due to monastic ideas about the desert, but also because of the attempt to disassociate forestis from any strict geographical meaning, many authors point out that forestis could include not only woodlands, but also other “wastelands” such as swamps and moorlands. Roman sources set saltus as a direct opposite to ager, a juxtaposition that Fichtenau argues resembles the medieval incultum/cultum binary. This is an intriguing set of contrasts, particularly when set in the context of discussions of whether wilderness and waste are equivalent, and if monastic views of wilderness and civilization were similarly binary or were instead, as I argue, overlapping.

Descriptions of the Pastoral Landscape

Descriptions of the Ardennes as a place of desert hermitage show that the monks placed importance on the idea of isolation. They found solitude in the topography; trees and mountains defended, protected, and isolated the monks. However, solitude was not the only thing that the monks sought from their new desert wilderness. The monks of Stavelot-Malmedy controlled and managed woodland resources, and found many ways to measure, value, and assess them as sources of material wealth and social capital. They restored and maintained infrastructure, managed taxes and tithes, and controlled and redistributed labor and resources. Though these activities were seemingly at odds with their goals of spiritual isolation, the monks incorporated them into their religious identity through stories about the power of the saints to protect monastic landed interests. To bolster their social and religious power, they tempered the desert ideal with descriptions of a controlled and bountiful natural world, a source of abundance, fertility, and peace—an idealized pastoral landscape.

In the opening passages of the Vita Remacli, Heriger described Gaul as “rich in streams and rivers full of fish, the most fertile soil, the richest pasture for cattle, rich in nectared vines, numerous glades (nemora), abounding in a great plenty of fruits, gold and silver and other metals.”¹²⁸ This description is part of a long literary tradition based on the glorification of places (encomium), perhaps best known to medievalists from Bede’s description of England in the Ecclesiastical History (available by the eleventh century at Stavelot’s library). After establishing the political geography of Britain, Bede writes that “the island is rich in crops and in trees, and has good pasturage for cattle and beasts of burden. It also produces vines in certain districts and has plenty of both land- and waterfowl of various kinds. It is remarkable too for its rivers, which abound in fish.”¹²⁹ Such images of abundance borrow from classical descriptions of the pastoral, and appear in Late Antique descriptions of the famous rivers of Germany and Belgium.

Ausonius, a Gallo-Roman rhetorician and poet, penned what is perhaps his most famous work, a 483-line poem in praise of the Mosel River, around A.D. 371.¹³⁰ The poem describes a journey down the Mosel, acknowledging the beauty of the landscape and the river, the presence of humans and their industries, and the river’s abundance and fertility. “Hail river,” he wrote:

blessed by the fields, blessed by the husbandmen, to whom the Belgae owe the imperial honour which graces their city (Trier): river, whose hills are o’ergrown with Bacchus’ fragrant vines, o’ergrown, river most verdant, thy banks with turf … thou hast all that belongs to springs, brooks, rivers, lakes, and tidal Ocean with his ebb and flow.… Do thou for me, O Nymph, dweller in the river’s realm, declare the hosts of the scaly herd, and from the depths of thy watery bed discourse of those throngs which glide in the azure stream.¹³¹

Ausonius addresses and praises the charms of all of the different fish in the river, while also describing fishing (from the perspectives of both the fisher and the fish), milling, and other human uses of natural resources. Though the Belgian people figure prominently in the poem, in the closing passages he reminds the reader of his broader intent: “and, putting off the praise of famous men, let me tell of the happy river in its joyous course through the green country-side, and hallow it in the waters of the Rhine.”¹³²

In the sixth century, the Latin poet and bishop Venantius Fortunatus continued this literary tradition, composing a series of poems that described the natural and human-made beauty of the Mosel River valley. Fortunatus, a native of the Vosges, wrote with a rich blend of classical literary tradition and Christian spirituality. His Mosel poems, written after 566 when he returned to live in Gaul, blend panegyric and encomium and demonstrate how German and Belgian landscapes were idealized and imagined at the dawn of the Middle Ages.¹³³

Fortunatus’s Mosel poems draw heavily on his classical training, and as Michael Roberts has pointed out, they are deeply indebted to the style and symbolism of Ausonius’s poems, drawing on a similar set of “features of the Gallo-Roman landowning ideal.”¹³⁴ Yet whereas Ausonius compares the Mosel extensively to sites in classical Greco-Roman world, and addresses many of the classical nymphs, deities, and spirits of the waters, Fortunatus frequently compares the river to his own home and connects his praise of nature to the Christian religion. Building on even earlier pastoral poetry and literature, these two poets bridged Late Antiquity, and helped to ensure that the elements of the classical pastoral survived to become incorporated into Christian writing. Indeed, Fortunatus is in every way a bridge between those genres, because in addition to writing classical poetry about the new Frankish leaders and territories, he was also the author of several vitae and miracle collections.¹³⁵

Two of his Mosel poems were written as panegyrics for local bishops. In a poem praising bishop Nicetius of Trier’s construction of a Mosel fortress, Fortunatus describes the waters that “desire to bring forth bounties. As much as the waters swell, the neighboring area yields up fish; from here banquets are produced.” Yet this fertility is also produced through the intervention of people, and “the native, rejoicing, recognizes the fruitful furrows, bearing prayers of fertility to the ripening field. The farmers nourish their eyes from the future harvest.”¹³⁶ This poem neatly reconciles the bishop’s material and spiritual efforts and binds early medieval religious culture with the classical literary tradition.

In a poem addressed to the bishop of Metz, Fortunatus begins with praise of the Mosel’s “dark stream,” which “softly rolls alongits great waters; it laps the banks, scented with the verdant sward, and the wave gently washes the grassy blades.” As with Ausonius’s poem, Fortunatus incorporates human industry seamlessly into his view of the natural beauty of the river. This pastoral, lush landscape is augmented by the human presence. Metz, a “gleaming” city, displays both natural abundance and the beauty of human industry and agriculture. Metz “rejoices, both sides besieged by fish. The delightful domain is bright with flourishing fields; here you see tended crops, and there you behold roses. You look forth on hills clothed in shady vines, fertile growth of all kinds strives for place.”¹³⁷

For Fortunatus, wine and vineyards, rich with both classical and Christian meaning, are one of the key markers of Gaul’s natural abundance. In a short epigram to Bishop Vilicus, he mentions Falernian wine as a symbol of class and taste. Yet though this classical culture lingers, the Christian metaphors abound. Where Ausonius invoked Bacchus, Fortunatus relies on the Christian God. In a poem to the bishop of Galicia, he wrote that “The vine dresser orders the rows in apostolic manner.… He cuts the fruitless wild vines out of the Lord’s field, and there are clusters of grapes where once were shrubs… and the fruitful harvest springs up evenly.”¹³⁸ Fortunatus’s Mosel is drawn into a Christian pastoral landscape, and aspects of the natural world that could also serve as markers of the desert wilderness are here transformed into signs of fertility. In poem 10.9, he writes, “not even here are the unyielding stones free to be without fruit; indeed the rocks are fruitful and flow with wine … the vines are clustered thickly in rows planted on the crags… the patches cultivated by the farmers shine amidst the savage rocks.”¹³⁹

Throughout his poems, Fortunatus praises human industry and the deliberate harvest and use of resources. At Andernach, “there are vineyards here in broad stretches on the hills, another area is of level tilled land; but the abundance of that beautiful place is all the greater because there is a second harvest for the people in the waters.”¹⁴⁰ Fish, in Fortunatus’s poems, are not Ausonius’s personified resources. Instead, alongside wine, they are symbolic markers of both natural and Christian fertility. From the Mosel, “the fish leaps up from the wave,” and the nets of fishers are spread so thickly that they could ensnare boats.¹⁴¹ In the epigram to Bishop Vilicus, Fortunatus made the Christian connection explicit, writing, “your nets, father, are overflowing with heavy fish; it seems that you have merited the part of Peter.”¹⁴²

Fortunatus also wrote about the Ardennes and the Vosges, drawing the forests into both the world of lyric landscape poetry and that of the Gallo-Roman leisure class. He imagined an idyllic region, where his friend, Gogo, could experience what we would today call an outdoor lifestyle:

What occupies his carefree mind in tranquil times? if he lingers by the banks of the wave-driven Rhine to catch with his net in its waters the fat salmon, or roams by the grape-laden Moselle’s stream¹⁴³

The poem continues, invoking the “gentle breeze,” and the soothing shade provided by the riverside vineyards. It also links up the region’s other tributary streams, and moving Gogo (and the reader) deeper into the lands that within a generation would be swept up in the monastic world that had been so influenced by Fortunatus’s hero-bishops and the saints and monks whose biographies he wrote:

Or else does he wander the sunny groves and glens and with his net snare wild animals, with his spear kill them? Does the forest crack and thunder in the Ardennes or Vosges with the death of stag, goat, elk, or aurochs, shot by his arrows? … Or does he cultivate his property, furrowing the dried-out tilth, as the bull groans at the plow’s weight on his untrained neck?¹⁴⁴

In Fortunatus’s Ardennes, also full of wild animals, there is no sense of fear, and no sense of a struggle for survival (either physical or metaphysical). Instead, this is a landscape for leisure and livelihood, and Gogo, an early medieval man, can enjoy the pleasures of the Roman upper classes. The Ardennes teem with a wide and abundant set of game animals, and Fortunatus exults in the abundance of God’s Creation.

The parallels to the Roman pastoral are clear, especially in the final evocation of the power of the plow. Gogo tames the bull, and through his cultivation turns the “sunny groves and glens” of the Ardennes into a productive landscape. This “wilderness” is not at all removed from the agricultural landscape. This is, as Cronon would have us see, a domesticated landscape but one that is not separate from the wild.

Fortunatus’s Late Antique images of the Ardennes seem to come from a different world than the harsh and isolated forests that accompanied stories of monastic foundations. Yet the monks, too, could view the Ardennes as safe, productive, and beautiful. They wrote passages that reflect these vibrant and verdant landscapes, taking up the mantle of classical and Late Antique pastoral writing. The tenth-century vita Beregisi, for example, details how the saint established Andage/Saint-Hubert in a wooded spot (saltus) that was divinely revealed to him. It was a beautiful place: the woods (nemora) were dense and leafy, and it was also (as fits the image of the Ardennes as a desert) “far removed from the city.” The lush forest, with its fruit-bearing trees, was aplace of beauty and abundance: “There, the place made fertile by very clear and healthful waters, bearing verdant meadows with rich soil, surrounded by the loveliness of woods (nemora), it offers great benefit for those seeking the solitary life.”¹⁴⁵

The vita Beregisi describes the fertile waters and grasses of the Ardennes; the Translatio Quirini describes the animal resources. The area around the Amblève River was fertile and abounding in wild game: “The hunter, becoming lost, was accustomed to carry a spear through the places where many wild animals were known to arise, attending to the more abundant pastures, and to throw out fishing or birding nets, to catch up all the flying and swimming creatures that thrived there in abundance.”¹⁴⁶ Though found in an eleventhcentury work, this could be Gogo’s Ardennes. Yet these pastoral references are incorporated seamlessly into hagiographical works—connecting monasticism and monastic uses of nature not to images of stark wildness, but to ideas of boundless nature, utility, and fertility.