Powerful as such monastic images are, it is important to remember that the forests were filled not only with animals, but also with people. The frequent association of the ferocity of wild animals with danger carried over into representations of humans who posed danger to the monasteries as having beastly characteristics. As but one example of many, the eleventh-century Passio describes the enemy guards who kill Agilolf as animals gnashing their teeth and thirsting for blood.61 Aside from the spiritual danger of general consort with society, expressed in the desire for isolation, the monks faced specific threats from inimical people. The forest did not create true isolation, but its relative isolation from the main routes to larger communities and justice encouraged both planned and spontaneous criminality.
This was clearly linked to the main dichotomy of monastic settlement; though the monks strove to build in sites that were or appeared to be geographically isolated, the growing houses were closely tied to the local and regional economic framework and were wealthy and well endowed. This made monasteries prime targets for both minor and major theft, and the monastic concern with this is reflected in a multitude of stories. The Ardennes were crossed by several major roads, but since there were only a handful of options, and since these roadways were often flanked by forests or other inhospitable environments, travelers were vulnerable. Interestingly, many of these examples cluster around the year 1000, perhaps reflecting the possibility that Ardennes houses were affected by the increasing criminality that led to the Peace of God movement.
One case of highway crime in the Ardennes was immortalized in the tenth-century vita of saint Evermarus (d. ca. 700), who was killed near Tongres on his way to visit Remacle’s tomb at Stavelot. Allegedly, a brigand stopped Evermarus on the road, chased him through the forest, and killed him and his companions. Their bodies were then found by one of King Pippin’s royal hunters and buried in a woodland chapel. Two centuries later, the relics were translated, which occasioned the composition of the vita.62 The rigors and dangers of travel are also found in the eleventh-century Translatio Quirini, whose author wrote that the monks suffered exhaustion and hunger on the road, surviving storms and “extending many efforts, and also enduring as many thieves and fears of the road.”63
One morning the monks took to the road amidst a gathering of exultant locals. But, “they had scarcely traveled four milia before their rejoicing turned into sorrow.”64 Having heard a rumor that the monks were carrying worldly riches along with the relics, some men “all conspired as one to seize violently the monastic treasures.” But the would-be thieves, “inspired by devilish purposes,” were foiled by God, who “sent amongst them such a great fog that they were separated from one another and in no way able to succeed.” Though in this case the sudden appearance of a fog protected the monks, the story shows how weather and landscape could create spaces for evildoing; had it not been a divine boon, the blanket of fog might just as easily have allowed the thieves to act with impunity. The author directly compares this event to one of the great desert miracles of the flight from Egypt, adding that “using the fog as a servant, [God] saved [our] patron from the midst of an enemy people.” Invoking Egypt was not unexpected: the twelfth-century life of St. Bernard of Tiron equates the European forest explicitly with the biblical wilderness: “But there were in the border region between Maine and Brittany vast wildernesses (regionis vaste solitudines) which at that time flourished like a second Egypt with a multitude of hermits.”65
The later compositional phases of the Miracula Remacli, composed around 1040 during Poppo’s abbacy, contain numerous examples of thieves (who were, of course, ultimately caught through the saint’s intervention). Some of the thefts were of animals and agricultural products, but in other cases, more valuable goods were stolen. Some crimes took place on the road, for example when people bringing tithes to the monasteries were attacked en route. Other crimes occurred in the monasteries, as was the case when a cleric arrived at Stavelot as a newcomer. This stranger, the author claims, went to the monastery specifically to win the monks’ trust and rob them of their treasures. This man purportedly chose Stavelot because “the very solitude of the monastery aided him.”66 The miraculous protection of the monks against theft may also be connected to eleventh-century critiques of monastic wealth associated with monastic reforms.
Several of the hagiographical sources present the forests of the Ardennes as a shelter or haven for not just thieves, but also enemy troops. At Stavelot, this theme seems to have developed primarily as a response to the ninth-century Viking raids. The second book of the Miracula Remacli presents the Vikings as immoral, pestiferous, and a form of divine punishment. One of the compilers wrote that “our wickedness, I believe… called down God’s 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