The author of the ninth-century vita prima was not simply inventing a Merovingian past; he instead converted the royal charter to serve monastic purposes. This can be seen in the way that the language reflects (though does not copy) that of the founding charter, for example in passages describing the donation of “twelve leugas” of land to the monastery.11 Whereas the royal charter defines this act as an attempt to forestall conflict with other people, the vita prima reports that the boundary meant that within that area the monks would encounter no one. The author then explains that Remacle considered the site to be an empty place, a place of hermitage, where “having observed the flattering enticements of the world, [the monks] could live withdrawn from secular cares.”12
The promotion of the ideal of solitude is still found a century later in the vita Remacli, written in the late 900s by Heriger of Lobbes (d. 1007), who based his work on the charters and the vita prima and also made significant alterations to the narrative. Heriger, an active monastic leader who was perhaps also concerned about the growing tenth-century tensions between clergy and local lords, revived and perpetuated the solitude topos. He did this in part through descriptions of the environment as inhospitable and isolated. Stavelot was “confined by mountains,” and construction of buildings at Malmedy was “impeded by the swamps.” The idea of physical solitude was reinforced by the absence of people; local populations were “not fully established,” and there were only remnants of the former inhabitants, who had been “bound up in idolatry.” These unnamed people had constructed a hostile pagan landscape full of temples and effigies, and for Remacle and the monks, the ghostly presence of the former residents was as much a tangible obstacle as the swamps.13
Heriger’s vita also includes a discussion of Remacle’s earlier (failed) attempt at founding a monastery at Cugnon. As with Stavelot-Malmedy, the earliest mention of Cugnon is from a seventh-century royal charter, which reports that Sigibert III decided to found a regular monastery “in honor of our patrons Peter, Paul, John, and the other martyrs, in our lands, the silva Ardenense, at a place called Cugnon, surrounded by the Semois River.”14 Although the vita prima passes over the foundation of Cugnon in silence, the vita Remacli does mention it, noting that it was “a place that was seen to be well-suited for monastic life.”15 This ideal site “located in the harsh mountains” and “on the soil of the Ardennes” was surrounded by a river and “carved out of the rocks.”16 Both the charter and the vita, though written centuries apart, emphasize the location of the monastery—surrounded by a river and a forest, cut off from the secular world. But this proposed foundation appears never to have been actualized—only the single charter survives, preserved as a part of Stavelot-Malmedy’s records, and excavations have yielded no evidence of a monastic complex.17 Yet though the foundation failed, in the tenth century the place remained, according to Heriger, a “place of prayer.”18
Heriger also emphasized the importance of solitude in another of his works, the vita Hadalini, on a monastic founder who was a contemporary of Remacle’s. This work briefly describes the early history of Stavelot-Malmedy: “after [Remacle] had established his monasteries and had gathered monks to him, he built a great housing unit ideal for monastic use” where the monks could always follow “a life of prayer and solitude.”19 Remacle also instructed Hadalinus to build his own monastery, Chelles, “in the valley that is next to the forest (saltus) near the Letia river,” at a place called “between the four mountains.” Life there was predictably harsh; isolated by the mountains and the forest, Hadalinus cleared a space in this deserted landscape, working through hunger and thirst, in the cold and in utter poverty.20 Thus, though the forest in its broadest sense provided isolation and protection, it could also be dangerous, and fit to be cleared and “converted” and used by the monks for their own purposes.
The association of Stavelot-Malmedy’s local landscape with physical and social isolation, so prominent in the foundation charter and the early legends, is still found during Wibald’s abbacy, another period of broader regional turbulence and monastic consolidation. There is a difference, however; whereas the earliest foundation stories explicitly presented the isolation of the forest/desert/wilderness as a means of perfecting monastic purpose, this idealization of the retreat was so ingrained by the twelfth century that Wibald was able to indicate this complex set of ideas in a type of rhetorical shorthand. Yet it is at this point that Stavelot-Malmedy was arguably the most connected to other parts of Europe and the world. Urbanization in the Low Countries, ties of local leaders to the internationalizing force of the crusades, participation in regional synods, and monastic bonds to a monarchy now centered to the West all exposed the houses to more people than ever before. A widely traveled and by no means isolated leader, Wibald nevertheless clearly associated isolation from the world with the ultimate goal of a religious life (though one he himself could not realize).
Wibald used the inherited tradition of woodland isolation as an extension of the desert in order to manipulate his readers into thinking of his noted absences as an extension of his larger commitment to the monastic ideal. For example, he used it to avoid a trip to Rome with Archbishop Arnold of Cologne. First, he noted, he had been busy with local political concerns. He also reminded Arnold of the danger of the trip to Rome; he himself had “often been thrown into incredible dangers” en route. Finally, he wrote that he would gladly meet Arnold in Saxony in late August, but at the present he was unwilling and unable to leave his isolated location. “With us being fixed in our ancient woodland solitude,” he wrote, “these pleasant religious duties rarely come to [our] attention.”21 Despite this isolation, in another letter Wibald told the bishop of Havelberg that if the papal chancellor were ever to demand his presence, he would drop everything to go to Rome and arrive “at his feet,” even if he had decided never again to visit Rome because he was “living in the most remote desert.”22
The Value of Danger in the Landscape
A long-settled, mountainous, and forested region such as the Ardennes could in fact be a desert. Because of their relative separation from the royal court and urban life the monks could easily feel that, in the midst of a settled landscape, they lived in comparative isolation, and faced a dangerous wilderness. Heriger’s work provides another tie to the ancient desert wilderness: fear. In the vita Remacli, he reports that in the earliest stages of foundation, the monks were often frightened by the roars of unseen wild animals. Full of horror, they fled to Remacle, who told them that the animals were tied to the devil, and represented temptation. He explained that the devil was “like a lion in a cave,” lying in wait to deter men from their purposes, and that withstanding their fear of the animals would give them strength.23
And there was real reason to fear the forest; the residents of the Ardennes and their livestock faced wild animals and human predators, groups that monastic sources unsurprisingly equated with one another. The real dangers faced by the monks and their dependents led to an escalated rhetoric of danger. Vito Fumagalli argued that terror in the face of forests and wild animals was a key part of medieval responses to nature. He called this the “landscape of fear,” arguing that early medieval culture was dominated by large, remote wildernesses and that “people were swallowed up in a countryside which was still largely untamed and had vast expanses of wilderness everywhere.” Perhaps too swept up in monastic language, he pictured the forest as a dynamic enemy to civilization, and “trees, bushes and undergrowth everywhere encroached on and smothered the ruins of long-deserted towns and villages.”24
Danger did not deter the monks from seeking out the forest; danger was a draw. And from the moment they first appear in the historical record, the Ardennes are big, dark,