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
