Negotiating the Landscape. Ellen F. Arnold

common premodern ways to manage forests for the production of firewood was to take advantage of the fact that trees have many ways of regenerating themselves, either from roots, stumps, or trunks. People can exploit this natural tendency by cropping trees to encourage more frequent regrowth. These new branches (or shoots) grow out from central tree stumps that can survive for hundreds of years. The protection and then harvesting of these shoots (called coppicing) produces a steady, renewable, and predictable source of small wood. Another method of harvesting live trees is pollarding, which harvests from approximately five to seven feet high on the tree trunk, protecting the new shoots from animals (though the products are often used as fodder). These processes, often incorporated alongside other forest management techniques, were ubiquitous in medieval Europe.²⁴ By regularly cutting off all of the trees’ branches, these processes frequently arrest and restart tree growth and development, allowing people to harvest crops at planned and regular intervals, creating, in effect, “branch-farms.”²⁵

      Coppicing was one of the true hallmarks of the medieval forest. Oliver Rackham goes so far as to claim that the key difference between “wildwood” (a term he studiously uses in the place of both “wilderness” and “virgin forest”) and “woodland” or the domestic forest was “above all management by rotational felling to provide a succession of crops and by fencing to protect the young growth from grazing animals.”²⁶ A landscape like the Ardennes was probably coppiced with standards, a process that produces a multilayered forest; the coppice is the underwood, and scattered larger trees, called standards, are grown for timber or preserved to provide animal fodder. These older, more mature trees provide shade and shelter for animals as well as ensuring multiple tree resources from a single patch of managed woodland.²⁷ But even the large standards found within coppiced zones are a direct product of human woodland management since they were artificially selected in favor of trees that would provide fruit, nuts, or timber.

      In heavily forested regions such as the Ardennes, the woods were used not only for fuel production but also for pasturing, animal-rearing, and harvesting forest products. This may have preserved the larger forest ecosystems alongside more heavily managed areas. A combination of managed and unmanaged forest in the regions controlled by Stavelot-Malmedy would have produced woodlands whose visual appearance could vary dramatically, an effect that may have contributed much to the monks’ multiple cultural views of their landscape.

      Also of importance for understanding the monks’ relationship to their forests is that coppicing reflects the multiple layers of monastic land management. Forest resources were essential for the exploitation of the rest of the landscape. Coppicing produced fuel for daily needs and to support industry, and the rods were used to create tools, fencing, roofing, baskets, fish weirs, and many other materials necessary for agricultural success.²⁸ Prüm’s estates again provide a depth of detail about the uses of coppiced wood that is not available in Stavelot-Malmedy’s record. The Urbar demonstrates the ubiquity and scale of coppicing and the variety of ways in which coppice products enhanced and supported other agricultural activities. At least twenty-one estates provided rods or staves (palos) to the monastery, generally ranging from 50 to 100 rods per manse. Perhaps most startling, the 2.5 manses and 57 small vineyards at the estate of Mehring owed annually 15,700 rods and an additional 11,400 rods for fencing.²⁹ The rods could be used as fence poles, for thatching fences, for supporting vines in the monastery’s many vineyards, and for building fish weirs. Iversheim’s manses provided “rods for the vineyard,” Dienheim provided “rods for the fishery,” and the residents of Albisheim had to both provide the rods and then deliver them to the fishery.³⁰

      Many of the monastery’s dependents owed annual labor services that included not only delivering the rods to the vineyards and fisheries, but also using them to stake grapevines and, frequently, to fence in demesne lands. Caesarius explained that the fencing units were “thirty feet long” and added that the workers “must build the fence where they are ordered.”³¹ In Remich residents were obligated to provide 50 rods annually, and to build 180 feet of fencing “by the fishery” and 150 feet around the demesne.³² Fencing could either be done by thatching or wattling (using coppicing products) between fence posts (far more common) or by using some of the many boards that the properties also owed. Bastogne’s residents were instructed to use fence posts and planking, using five planks for every section of fence.³³