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),
