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
