DURING THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES, THE NORTHERN FORESTS of Europe were still vast, stretching across the continent like domes of darkness and the indifference of time. Interspersed throughout them were smaller or larger settlements lost in the shadows of antiquity's decline. With respect to the medieval social order that was reorganizing itself on the basis of new feudal and religious institutions, the forests were foris, "outside."
In them lived the outcasts, the mad, the lovers, brigands, hermits, saints, lepers, the maquis, fugitives, misfits, the persecuted, the wild men. Where else could they go? Outside of the law and human society one was in the forest. But the forest's asylum was unspeakable. One could not remain human in the forest; one could only rise above or sink below the human level.
Renaud de Montaubon, a medieval epic describing the privations suffered by a band of robbers, moved its readers with pity for the forest outcasts, much the way a television documentary about the homeless might move Americans today. The audience felt a certain shame, since the forests did indeed harbor such misery.