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Chapter 2

Controlling the Domesticated Landscape

Value, Ownership, and Religious Interpretations

Even though the idea of the forest as desert wilderness was so dominant in the monks’ imagination, they did not use the image of isolation to hide their use of nature or to ignore the productive landscape. The monks moved beyond the “desert” by including the realities of an inhabited and domesticated natural world in their understanding of their religious and cultural identities and legacies. They built on the long Latin literary tradition of the pastoral, and, as Venantius Fortunatus had done, they connected the classical idea of a locus amoenus to Christian concepts of holiness. Success in the material world provided an alternate way for the monks to understand their relationships with their dependents and neighbors, their natural environment, and their God.

The connection between spirituality and land management has not gone unnoticed. Historians have raised important discussions of the connections between Cistercian ideology and practice, especially concerning the tension between agricultural development and wilderness and waste topoi, but this scholarship focuses largely on the Cistercians rather than their early medieval precedents.¹ This can be seen in the Cistercian “foundation” story of the conversion of Pons of Leras, which intimately connects the adoption of Cistercian religious ideas to the forested landscape. As Constance Berman notes, “the account begins with an elaborate play on the words silva, silvaniensis, and salva nos in its discussion of the role of salvation at Silvanés,” and this “wilderness solitude” is in fact marked most by agricultural labor.² The reputation of the Cistercians for turning wilderness into productive land is itself part of a Cistercian rhetoric of monastic reform and rehabilitation, connected to the effective eclipsing of similar Benedictine wilderness ideas. As John Van Engen has pointed out, the almost univocal Cistercian critique of earlier monks has drowned out much of the dynamism and vitality of Benedictine spirituality (and, I would add, of Benedictine land management).³ Here is another way in which this case study can highlight the complexity of monastic culture and practices; the previous chapter showed how the monks of Stavelot-Malmedy constructed ideas of the Ardennes as wild. This chapter focuses on the ways that the monks interacted with that same landscape in ways that encouraged them to see it as domesticated.

The most striking feature of the Ardennes, then and now, is the extensive forest cover, which has been altered by human inhabitation for millennia. By the early medieval period, this forest would in some ways have contributed to a monastic sense of isolation, of marginalization from the champion landscape further to the south (even by the 600s clearly more fully settled and agriculturally developed), and even of living in an uncontrollable and inhospitable landscape. Yet the monasteries of the Ardennes were successful not in spite of their mountains, swift streams, and dense forests, but because of them. The forests themselves were of fundamental agricultural and economic importance; Stavelot-Malmedy’s leaders invested deeply in the agricultural infrastructure of the Ardennes, and their activities helped to shape a domesticated, pastoral landscape that was at times teeming with abundance, managed, and molded to shape human needs.

Though the monks of Stavelot-Malmedy would later claim otherwise, people had settled along the major river valleys in and near the Ardennes as early as 1000 b.c., when Neolithic people and animals first began to alter the dense forests of the Ardennes. Prehistoric clearance of forested land for fields and animal grazing established a base pattern of agricultural settlement in the region that would only intensify as the years passed.⁴ Human exploitation of the natural forest and woodland resources continued with the Roman incursions and early medieval settlement. Yet even with such anthropogenic effects, the Ardennes remained heavily forested.

This is in part due to the sheer scale of those forests and in part to the fact that despite the focus in some scholarship on deforestation, medieval forests were not haphazardly drained of resources. Beginning around the 1960s, scholars created a picture of the ancient world as severely deforested and desiccated through human agency.⁵ One archaeologist argued that the initial Celtic clearance of part of the Ardennes was “the fundamental basis for first the degradation and finally the disappearance of the forests.”⁶ When connected with the broader discussion of the deforestation of France and Belgium (the “Great Clearances”) over the course of the central Middle Ages, such views paint medieval people as carelessly and rampantly clearing forests in favor of arable land, fuel for industry, and profit-driven agriculture. Based on an example from the monastery of Saint-Denis from the 1100s, Marc Bloch remarked that by the Central Middle Ages “as a result of this relatively intensive and quite unregulated exploitation the ranks of the trees became progressively thinner … [and] there were already places where the woodland was sparse.”⁷ This extensive use of woodland, he claimed, combined with clearance for agricultural purposes and general economic and demographic decline led to a post-Carolingian countryside that had “an undeniably depopulated aspect, riddled with pockets of emptiness.”⁸ Using the same example, Georges Duby mirrored Bloch’s assessment of early medieval forest use, noting that the “open forests of the early Middle Ages [were] badly maintained and damaged by unplanned utilization.”⁹

However, an alternate approach has developed, spearheaded by the work of Oliver Rackham, a professional forester who advocates an understanding of the ancient and medieval forest as sustainably managed and developed rather than thoughtlessly destroyed. This approach emphasizes the continuity of forest use, concluding that medieval forest use was extensive and deliberate, but also much more stable, and focused on preserving standing trees and the protection of wooded zones.¹⁰ A vast array of animal, vegetable, and mineral resources were actively exploited by medieval people who recognized the enormous value of the forests as productive zones.

The evidence from Stavelot-Malmedy continues to reinforce the argument that forests were highly managed and well integrated into other aspects of the agricultural economy. Unsurprisingly the administrative documents from monasteries in the Ardennes include many references to forests and woodland resources. Some of these forests were used primarily for rearing pigs; others were managed for firewood. Some were densely vegetated; others would have been more sparsely treed, best suited for wood pasture. The monks of Stavelot controlled some of these woodlands in their entirety, some only partially, and several others appear to have been under the monks’ jurisdiction but not direct management. The diverse forest ecosystems provided sustainable, exploitable resources for a wide spectrum of medieval agricultural and economic pursuits, and the monks reconciled this to their views of forests as religious spaces.

Economic and Agricultural Uses of the Domesticated Landscape

By the ninth century, Stavelot-Malmedy, Saint-Hubert, and Prüm were all actively exploiting properties in the Ardennes. Using records from all three deepens our understanding of how the monks interacted with forests. As expected, these show a bounty of forested lands; seventy of Stavelot’s properties explicitly had forests, and it is likely, given both their location and medieval agricultural patterns, that almost all of their properties had access to some sort of woodland or forest.¹¹ This impression is upheld by the fact that in theory all of Prüm’s estates owed the monastery at least a few woodland products, and over half owed substantial amounts of more than one woodland product.

Facing such a wealth of woodlands, landowners in the Ardennes had many different ways of managing and exploiting trees and timber resources. Unfortunately, Stavelot and Saint-Hubert both have sparse and uneven administrative records that are impressionistic at best, and not able to be used to see changes in forest cover or forest use over time. However, Prüm provides a rich set of data on the types and quantities of woodland dues that monasteries in the Ardennes could have expected to collect. Prüm’s surviving records include a detailed polyptych (known as the Urbar of Prüm). It was originally composed in 893 and recopied and commented on by the abbot Caesarius in 1222.¹² It contains 118 separate entries, many of which report multiple properties. It also reports the taxes (in money and in kind) owed to the monastery and the labor duties of the dependent landholders and their servants. Finally, although he added commentary, Caesarius made few changes to the contents, in itself an argument for some degree of long-term continuity of both forest cover and forest management.

The large timber trees and the dense forest cover of the Ardennes were part of what allowed the monks to imagine dark, dangerous, and overwhelming forests, but they also helped the monks create economic success and manage their agricultural landscape. Timber was used for houses, sheds, barns, mills, churches, and many other buildings throughout the monasteries’ estates. Since the houses controlled hundreds of properties throughout the Ardennes, their timber demands would have been extensive. Prüm’s estates owed tithes of boards used for roofing, fencing, and building projects. Collectively, the estates owed at least 116 cartloads of boards and 20,850 individual boards annually. The majority of the properties also owed roofing shingles (around 40,000 were delivered to monastic officials annually), another indication of the scale of monastic building projects.

Around 1185, Countess Agnes of Chiny and Lambert of Étalle both gave portions of the silva of Bellumcampania to one of Saint-Hubert’s priories so that the monks could extract as much timber (ligna) as they needed to maintain the buildings.¹³ In the twelfth century, the administrator of Stavelot’s villa of Calchus was allowed to harvest timber from the forest to rebuild a cow barn.¹⁴ The villa of Stavelot could also be called on to supply “wood for building.” If the monastery were undertaking a large-scale building project, such as the renovation of the church that took place in 1040, it is conceivable that the villa could be asked to provide up to eighteen cartloads of timber to the monastery in a single summer.¹⁵

A more specific example of how tithes of timber products could be used to support monastic building comes from Caesarius’s comments in the Urbar. He notes that: “When he wishes to do so, the abbot can set up a lime kiln every year, for the purposes of building a church. All of the properties on this side of the Kyll river must help him with that. The properties of Densborn and Hermespand will deliver the rods and posts for the thatching of the kiln’s covering. All other estates from the Ösling must bring massive tree trunks. Each mansus will deliver four trunks, each of which should be 16 feet long and 2½ feet wide. The other estates, however, such as Rommersheim, Sarresdorf, and Wallersheim, each bring 16 cartloads of limestone.”¹⁶ This passage shows the monks directly managing how and when timber trees were felled, and using resources directly for spiritual purposes.

While the scale of such building projects was dramatic and involved use of the largest trees, fuel was a much more common use of tree resources. Every single one of Prüm’s estates owed at least one cord (glavem) of firewood annually. Caesarius specified that the cord should measure 12 feet long and 6 feet wide, and that every mansus had to bring this to the monastery in 12 deliveries (perhaps once a month).¹⁷ The single manse that the monks controlled at Fliessen owed a cord of wood annually, but the monastery collected 30 cords of wood every year from their estates at Rommersheim.¹⁸ Caesarius explains that “the monastery’s camerarius would receive the wood, and use it to make a sufficient fire in a heated room. This happens throughout the entire winter, beginning on the feast of All Saints and extending through the Easter holidays. The fire should be lit at the beginning of Matins, and burns through the end of Compline.”¹⁹ Again, the administrative record explicitly connects the economic resources to the monks’ spiritual purposes.

Prüm’s estates also provided a secondary form of fuel wood in the form of daurestuve (alternately facula—the Urbar uses both terms). These were bundles of tree bark burned to provide lighting inside estate buildings, including inside the barns “where the dependents thresh the wheat in December, when the days are short.” Caesarius explained that “every mansus provides 5 bundles and each bundle contains the bark of 15 trees.” It is unclear if this bark came from trees that could regenerate bark (such as birches) or if the bark was stripped from felled timber trees.²⁰ Though each mansus was required to provide 5 bundles (75 trees), many of the monastic properties provided far more: the single manse at Ginsdorf provided 50 bundles of bark and Monzelfeld’s six manses provided 300 bundles.²¹

The monks of Stavelot had direct rights to harvest firewood (materiaminima) from the silva of Astanetum. Additionally, the villa of Stavelot owed the monastery a regular tithe that could be met by the delivery of two carts of firewood, or “wood for burning,” three times a year.²² Larger fuel needs could also be met by the production of charcoal, which was intimately tied to forests and woodland management. It is possible that Stavelot’s “wood for burning” was intended not for the monastic stoves, but for being turned into charcoal to be distributed through other estates.²³

If Prüm can serve as a comparison, then these two records reveal only a small part of the fuel dues collected by Stavelot-Malmedy. The amount of fuel wood that Prüm received annually is staggering. The monastery collected at least 890 cords and 2,274 carts of firewood. It also received at least 6,816 bundles of bark (plus 34 and a half cartloads containing an unspecified number of bark bundles). At 15 trees apiece, the bark bundles alone represent some 100,000 trees, either harvested live or felled. These taxes represent only a small portion of the wood harvested and burned by the estates—this is not the amount they used or produced, but the amount they tithed. Furthermore, there were many other landholders exercising similar rights in the region, all of whom heavily managed and harvested the forests of the Ardennes. Truly, the Ardennes produced “battalions” of trees!

Yet even in heavily wooded areas like the Ardennes, medieval farmers and estate managers recognized the importance of ensuring a steady and sustainable supply of wood for fuel. Throughout the Middle Ages, people deliberately managed and harvested standing tree crops in ways that allowed demand to be met without necessitating a significant reduction in the size of forest and woodland cover. Though other uses and goals could lead to clearances, fuel demand does not appear to have led to large-scale deforestation. Constant demand instead encouraged conservative and renewable practices, and productive woodlands were protected and maintained over centuries.

One of the most common premodern ways to manage forests for the production of firewood was to take advantage of the fact that trees have many ways of regenerating themselves, either from roots, stumps, or trunks. People can exploit this natural tendency by cropping trees to encourage more frequent regrowth. These new branches (or shoots) grow out from central tree stumps that can survive for hundreds of years. The protection and then harvesting of these shoots (called coppicing) produces a steady, renewable, and predictable source of small wood. Another method of harvesting live trees is pollarding, which harvests from approximately five to seven feet high on the tree trunk, protecting the new shoots from animals (though the products are often used as fodder). These processes, often incorporated alongside other forest management techniques, were ubiquitous in medieval Europe.²⁴ By regularly cutting off all of the trees’ branches, these processes frequently arrest and restart tree growth and development, allowing people to harvest crops at planned and regular intervals, creating, in effect, “branch-farms.”²⁵

Coppicing was one of the true hallmarks of the medieval forest. Oliver Rackham goes so far as to claim that the key difference between “wildwood” (a term he studiously uses in the place of both “wilderness” and “virgin forest”) and “woodland” or the domestic forest was “above all management by rotational felling to provide a succession of crops and by fencing to protect the young growth from grazing animals.”²⁶ A landscape like the Ardennes was probably coppiced with standards, a process that produces a multilayered forest; the coppice is the underwood, and scattered larger trees, called standards, are grown for timber or preserved to provide animal fodder. These older, more mature trees provide shade and shelter for animals as well as ensuring multiple tree resources from a single patch of managed woodland.²⁷ But even the large standards found within coppiced zones are a direct product of human woodland management since they were artificially selected in favor of trees that would provide fruit, nuts, or timber.

In heavily forested regions such as the Ardennes, the woods were used not only for fuel production but also for pasturing, animal-rearing, and harvesting forest products. This may have preserved the larger forest ecosystems alongside more heavily managed areas. A combination of managed and unmanaged forest in the regions controlled by Stavelot-Malmedy would have produced woodlands whose visual appearance could vary dramatically, an effect that may have contributed much to the monks’ multiple cultural views of their landscape.

Also of importance for understanding the monks’ relationship to their forests is that coppicing reflects the multiple layers of monastic land management. Forest resources were essential for the exploitation of the rest of the landscape. Coppicing produced fuel for daily needs and to support industry, and the rods were used to create tools, fencing, roofing, baskets, fish weirs, and many other materials necessary for agricultural success.²⁸ Prüm’s estates again provide a depth of detail about the uses of coppiced wood that is not available in Stavelot-Malmedy’s record. The Urbar demonstrates the ubiquity and scale of coppicing and the variety of ways in which coppice products enhanced and supported other agricultural activities. At least twenty-one estates provided rods or staves (palos) to the monastery, generally ranging from 50 to 100 rods per manse. Perhaps most startling, the 2.5 manses and 57 small vineyards at the estate of Mehring owed annually 15,700 rods and an additional 11,400 rods for fencing.²⁹ The rods could be used as fence poles, for thatching fences, for supporting vines in the monastery’s many vineyards, and for building fish weirs. Iversheim’s manses provided “rods for the vineyard,” Dienheim provided “rods for the fishery,” and the residents of Albisheim had to both provide the rods and then deliver them to the fishery.³⁰

Many of the monastery’s dependents owed annual labor services that included not only delivering the rods to the vineyards and fisheries, but also using them to stake grapevines and, frequently, to fence in demesne lands. Caesarius explained that the fencing units were “thirty feet long” and added that the workers “must build the fence where they are ordered.”³¹ In Remich residents were obligated to provide 50 rods annually, and to build 180 feet of fencing “by the fishery” and 150 feet around the demesne.³² Fencing could either be done by thatching or wattling (using coppicing products) between fence posts (far more common) or by using some of the many boards that the properties also owed. Bastogne’s residents were instructed to use fence posts and planking, using five planks for every section of fence.³³