Negotiating the Landscape. Ellen F. Arnold

the Medieval Forest: Waste, Resource, or Wilderness?

      The monks used images of isolation and danger to construct an idea of the forest as a desert wilderness where they could struggle to shape their identity. Most of this wilderness idea was based on the construction of a space free of people; yet the dangers posed by enemies and criminals suggest that even this idea needed a foil. Without people to avoid, the idea of the forest as solitude lost much of its force. The forest was a site of temptation, after all, and as the monks came in contact with the secular world, they added new stories to those of the forest as desert. It should therefore not come as a surprise that when we shift from the miraculous to the mundane, we are faced with both a similar range of ways of describing and discussing forested landscapes and a struggle over whether forests were wasteland or useful. The saltus, for example, is often seen as a no-man’s-land, linking it (and subsequently most forest and woodland words) into the discussion of the “forest wilderness.” Wilderness (medieval and otherwise) is a concept that stretches past settlement questions or aesthetics into issues of ownership and legal status, and discussion of use of “marginal” or “waste” lands is central to the legal, political, and proprietary discussions of the history of woods and wilderness.

      The blurring of several ways of seeing forests led to the development of multiple sets of vocabulary to describe forests as place, resource, and even as abstract idea. There are numerous Latin terms that were used during the Middle Ages that denoted, to some extent, forests or woodlands, including silva, nemus, saltus, boscus, and waldus. The sources from Stavelot and Malmedy contain several of these: saltus, nemus, and, most commonly, silva and forestis. Stavelot-Malmedy’s charters also apply forest words flexibly—even at times casually. The range and interchangeability of these words suggests that for the medieval participants, the choice of words was not determined solely by strict technical or legal definitions. In Stavelot’s early documents, labeling words did not have precise, legal definitions, and could be substituted readily for one another in similar contexts. This discouraged the development of concrete, universal definitions for forests and woodlands, and instead encouraged medieval writers to develop other ways to describe them.

      Though much effort has been spent trying to pin it down, the exact relationship between these words remains elusive and ambiguous. Forest historians interested in ecological and landscape history have tried to find ways of differentiating between medieval words in an attempt to ascertain the degree of medieval forest cover. Others focusing on the study of charters and other legal documents expect (and want) to find a legal precision in words. Both of these directions privilege precision and work to avoid or clarify ambiguities in the written record. Yet I think the ambiguities need to be better understood on their own as reflections of the fact that forests and woodlands served many interests. Medieval forest vocabulary is mutable, nuanced, and ambiguous due to several different competing forces that are worth notice: local particularism versus state-sponsored standardization, official chancery language versus literary Latin, legal precision versus rhetorical aims, and even noble interest in hunting versus monastic interest in supporting an agrarian economy.

      It is the broader contexts of sources that provide the meaning, not just the specific terms themselves. Even in charter contexts, “technical” words could be manipulated and substituted and rearranged. In charters, other phrases and additional qualifiers were used to add specificity, and in narrative sources flexible vocabulary could be used to enhance metaphors, blur boundaries between different ideas about forests, and provide variety of tone. Acknowledging that forest words could lack precision can also make us more comfortable dealing with a similar lack of specificity in medieval concepts of the “definition” and “value” of resources and landscapes.

      In part because of the importance of England’s Forest Law and of modern ideas of state-sponsored forestry, scholars of medieval legal and woodland history have tried to work out precise meanings for forest terms (especially forestis) and to construct a history of their legal applications.⁷⁴ There are certainly contexts in which medieval terminology had legal, definite, and precise meanings, and this is an important aspect to understanding the development of medieval states, languages, and economies. Yet it is also important to recognize that not all terms had legal precision at all times or in all contexts.

      As has been pointed out in recent studies of vocabulary relating to castles, the imprecision of some medieval vocabulary could be a strength, allowing an ambiguity of meaning to reflect flexibility of practice and experience. In his revisionist approach to castle history, Matthew Johnson pointed out that the “search for a tight definition or classification of species or subspecies of form is unhelpful. There is no one essential category of ‘castle.’ It was a fluid idea in the medieval mind.”⁷⁵ This fluidity and uncertainty is not always something we’re comfortable with when we encounter it in medieval history, yet it is present throughout the sources: “it is not only medieval notions of space that are characterized by imprecision and approximation. As we shall see, time was measured in an even more capricious way. In general, with regard to quantitative terms—measures of weight, capacity, numbers of people, dates, etc.—arbitrariness and imprecision were the norm.”⁷⁶ When exploring chestnut production in Italy, Paolo Squatriti noted that records of the practice show “the inappropriateness of applying to it rigid classical agronomical and legal categories like ‘ager,’ ‘saltus,’ and ‘silva,’ or even the more modern historiographical distinction between ‘incolto’ and ‘coltivato.’”⁷⁷

      For a few of the forest words, flexibility of use dates to the classical period. Silva was a classical term that carried over to the Middle Ages, and could be applied broadly to many types of natural and managed woodlands. It was the “most generally-used word for woods,”⁷⁸ and therefore more specialized vocabulary also developed during the classical and medieval periods that incorporated and adapted the word silva. These more exact woodland terms included: silva caedua, coppice woods; silva glandifera, oak-acorn forest; and silva pascua, woodland pasture. During the classical period, silva also had mixed cultural meanings. Sometimes it represented chaos, or disordered matter, and at other times it was associated with pastoralism, highlighting one of the chief features of woodland and forest vocabulary: a literary, legal, and cultural flexibility of meaning, use, and application.⁷⁹

      Despite its flexibility, silva was indisputably associated with features of the natural world. This is not the case with saltus, a classical term associated with both geographical and legal ideas. Heinrich Rubner defined the Roman saltus as land that (though often wooded) was characterized by its legal status as a “res nullius” or no-man’s land on which civilians could hunt freely.⁸⁰ Josef Semmler echoed Rubner’s claim for a jurisdictional definition of saltus: “The late antique saltus excluded no one: everyone was allowed to hunt large and small game, and to catch birds and fish.”⁸¹ And Chris Wickham defined saltus as a land that “could be hunted over by anyone.”⁸² Such definitions evoke Georges Duby’s optimistic statement that “the forest in the early Middle Ages had been a bottomless reservoir open to all, in which every man could plunge according to his needs.”⁸³

      Yet saltus was also associated with woods, and with the word silva. By the early Middle Ages, Isidore of Seville (whose works were found in Stavelot’s library) defined saltus as “vast, wooded (silvestria) areas, where trees leap up to the heights.”⁸⁴ Despite Isidore’s eloquent topographic definition, saltus has continued to be studied primarily as it relates to legal rights and limits during the classical and Late Antique periods, and how those might have been transferred over to the Middle Ages.

      Fluidity of vocabulary can be seen when the many different descriptions of the Ardennes are compared. The Ardennes were not consistently defined or labeled in Stavelot’s charters (a body of sources where some precision of terms might be expected). This is not due simply to changing chancery practice: Sigibert’s chancery issued three charters to the monasteries, and in these the Ardennes are labeled as forestis, saltus, and silva.⁸⁵ Richard Keyser has pointed out a similar “triple synonymy” for the Orthe, which appears “as alternatively the silva, nemus, or foresta of Orthe.”⁸⁶ The earliest of Sigibert’s