Negotiating the Landscape. Ellen F. Arnold

as a dangerous and hostile landscape, dominated by dense trees, swamps, and thickets of underbrush broken only occasionally by small clearings and glens where farmers clung to a tenuous existence. Only narrow paths cut through the dense trees that hid enemies and prevented easy travel. He wrote that the Germans “had settled where a hidden valley or a wooded locality (locus silvestris) or an entangled morass offered some hope of defense or security,” and “the woods forbade the advance of any close-formed body [of troops] along the hidden and uncertain tracks.”²⁶ Tacitus explained that the Germans “plant themselves separately and individually at some favorite spring or plain or grove.” The Germans had “sacred woods and groves,” but the forests were also fortresses. Though he did not specifically discuss the Ardennes, like Caesar, he described the Northern forests as a protection for the Germanic warriors, sheltered by “ramparts of forest or river.”²⁷

      These impressions of an imposing environment are not merely products of Mediterranean minds. The medieval Ardennes were in many ways similar to those of the modern period; one imagines that Caesar’s troops were often as miserable, frightened, and cold as those entrenched in the Battle of the Bulge. The landscape—dominated by steep mountains, dense forests, and rivers prone to flooding—could be a source of discomfort, fear, and even actual danger. For the Ardennes are rainy, foggy, and cold, with winds that race through the narrow river valleys. They can also be dangerously cold; Wibald’s correspondence includes a list of herbs from the Ardennes that were used as a medicinal treatment for chilblains, and the vita Popponis tells the story of a leper who risked dying of exposure. In the style of Martin, Poppo covered the man with his own cloak, after which the leper “sweated out” his leprosy.²⁸ The medieval sources bundle together descriptions of winter, darkness, and cold, all of which seem to outweigh other weather features. The Passio praised Agilolf for his ability to endure “many passions: hunger, vigils, cold, thirst, and the reproach of envy!”²⁹

      The area around Stavelot is the coldest and wettest region in Belgium, and the early Middle Ages saw recurring “hundred year winters,” strong enough to kill people, trees, vines, and animals; create famines; freeze major European bodies of water; and trigger health crises. Stavelot’s annals record two of these: in 972 there was an unusually harsh winter, and 872 saw “a most severe winter, floods, an earthquake, and, in certain places, plagues of locusts.”³⁰ Other chronicles name 873 as the year with the worst of the weather: plagues of locusts preceded a winter that defied all expectations and experiences. Hincmar of Reims wrote that the winter was “long and strong, and the snow was spread about in a quantity such as no one could remember ever seeing.”³¹

      Annalists in Xanten and Fulda also remembered 872, reporting that the summer was full of devastating storms. The author of the Translatio Quirini describes a night when “there were enormous winds, drenching rain, and the crash of thunder, from the morning to the sixth hour of the day.”³² The potential intensity of the weather is most clearly seen in the story of a storm so remarkable that it was recorded several times in miracle stories from Saint-Hubert. The first account, from about 850, describes a storm “So great that [its] monstrous fury… could not be satisfied except through the nearcomplete devastation of some of the nearby surrounding places.” Frightened for their immediate safety as well as their future livelihoods, the residents of the nearby village went to the monastery and the abbot led them in prayer at the saint’s tomb. When the prayers were finished, the author reports that “it happened that without any delay, the strength of the storm was then ended, and the darkness of the dense clouds, broken through by the radiant beams of the sun, was soon brightened.”³³

      The second collection of Hubert’s miracles was written around 1050, and parallels but significantly rewrites the stories from the first collection, either expanding upon or reducing the amount of detail. The second description of the storm adds several significant details, including dating it to the year 837,³⁴ which suggests that the monks were interested in presenting this storm as a real historic event, with the hope that the story would resonate with other peoples’ own experiences and fears, perhaps also spurring them on to penitence and support of the saint. In this retelling, the storm is still associated with anger, but the religious message is even stronger. The storm is not personified; rather, the anger is attributed to God. “It so happened,” this version begins, “that the furious anger of divine punishment was raging, and the greatest weight of that fury was put on the areas surrounding Saint-Hubert.”³⁵

      The association between uncontrollable weather and the will of God to punish or reward is a common theme in miracle literature. The ensuing description, however, is not generic, and instead seems to seek verisimilitude with the audience’s experiences: “so enormous were the torrential rainstorms and so ferocious the savagery of the storms, that it was enough [that the crop] was either torn out by the roots or weighted down to the ground, and because of the danger of hunger, death reached out menacingly to everyone.” Again, the story moves to the monastery, where the locals pray at the saint’s tomb, and “immediately, through the radiance of the sun, the torrent of the rains stopped, and for a long time afterwards, all of the different places suffered no damages from the storm.”³⁶

      This description’s emphasis on agricultural damages is further suggestion that the monks were interested in presenting a miraculous world that paralleled their lived environment. Fears of hail- and thunderstorms during the Carolingian period were very real, and frequently linked to agricultural risk; the cereal crops typical of Northern Europe were vulnerable to this weather, and this fear often led to attempts to avoid or prevent storm damages.³⁷ The ninth century was also marked by an attempt by church leaders to show divine rather than human control of nature, and to redefine their authority in the wake of Carolingian reforms. And so the monks of Saint-Hubert invoked the type of storm that local groups in the Ardennes may have faced and dreaded, and then demonstrated that it could be both caused and stopped by God and his saint.

      The miracles of Saint-Hubert also contain a second story about a sudden hailstorm that models how the monks imposed their own interpretations over natural phenomena. God could use nature to punish as well as protect. An army crossing through the Ardennes ransacked a village associated with Saint-Hubert: “when the horses sent out immoderately had destroyed the pastures, and the inhabitants, having lost any hope of being able to feed their own animals, had suffered, [the soldiers] did not leave them with only this pain; instead they also violently broke into their houses, and seized all of the foodstuffs that were inside them.” The soldiers then set up camp, and “the servants of the church petitioned their patron for help against this injury, and suddenly the covering heavens resounded terribly, and the greatest of storms bore down.”³⁸

      The storm soon completely darkened the sky and a sudden downpour inundated the encamped army; the soldiers risked being swept away by the torrential rain, and “fleeing with their shields over their heads to prevent colliding with the hail stones, they were scattered.” The army had to beg forgiveness of the villagers and seek shelter in their houses, and as morning broke, they left “quickly and fearfully” only to discover that all but two of their horses had been killed in the storm. This miracle again ties a local storm to divine protection and allowed the monks of the Ardennes to link control of a wild and dangerous nature to monastic and saintly protection of an agricultural landscape.

      Weather could also be associated directly with living saints. One of the best-known experiences of weather in the Ardennes is that of St. Lambert, the evangelizing bishop of Liège, who spent several years (from 674 to 681) in temporary exile at Stavelot. During one winter, Lambert stood nightly vigils, which were recorded in two hagiographical works, both of which emphasize the cold, wet winter nights that Stavelot’s monks routinely experienced. Lambert’s biographer noted that the saint penitently endured the weather, standing in front of the cross in the middle of the night, “naked and shuddering in the cold of winter.”³⁹ In the vita Remacli, Heriger claims that Lambert scorned the weather, standing in the middle of the night “saying psalms and prayers, in contempt of the cold and with his feet shod in snow.”⁴⁰ Though the barefoot penitent is of course a standard medieval image, this iteration of it became a fixture of Stavelot’s lore. Lambert’s life provided a model for withstanding the trials of nature. His