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), another indication of the scale of monastic building projects.
Around 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