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
