The Mowing-Devil
A 1678 pamphlet tells of a Hertfordshire farmer who swore the Devil could mow his oats rather than pay a fair price. By morning the field was mown. Crop circle writers later claimed its woodcut as the first crop circle.
On a summer night in 1678, so a London pamphlet claimed, a field of oats in Hertfordshire glowed “as if it had been all of a flame.” By morning the crop was mown so neatly that “no Mortal Man was able to do the like.” The farmer had sworn the Devil could cut it rather than pay a mower’s price. The pamphlet, The Mowing-Devil, carries a woodcut of a horned figure with a scythe cutting a ring of oats. Three centuries later that picture was claimed as the earliest record of a crop circle.
The pamphlet
The Mowing-Devil was one of the cheap news pamphlets sold in Restoration London. Such pamphlets reported strange events, monstrous births and judgements of God to a growing reading public. This one is anonymous and carries a licence dated 22 August 1678. It was reprinted later. The University of Pennsylvania holds a type facsimile, probably printed in London between 1810 and 1819, that keeps the woodcut and the 1678 licence line.
Its long title tells the whole story in advance.
“The Mowing-Devil: Or, Strange NEWS out of Hartford-shire. Being a True Relation of a Farmer, who Bargaining with a Poor Mower, about the Cutting down Three Half Acres of Oats, upon the Mower’s asking too much, the Farmer swore That the Devil should Mow it rather than He. And so it fell out, that very Night, the Crop of Oat shew’d as if it had been all of a Flame: but next Morning appear’d so neatly mow’d by the Devil or some Infernal Spirit, that no Mortal Man was able to do the like. Also, How the said Oats ly now in the Field, and the Owner has not Power to fetch them away.”
That title is the pamphlet’s own text, as transcribed in the Wikipedia article on it. “Three half acres” means one and a half acres, not three and a half.
The story it tells
A Hertfordshire farmer needed his oats cut and bargained with a poor mower. The mower asked more than the farmer would pay. In anger the farmer swore that the Devil should mow the field rather than the mower. It is the farmer who makes the oath. Some retellings, including earlier versions of this page, give the Devil line to the mower. The title does not support that.
That night, the pamphlet says, the field looked as if it was on fire. Next morning the oats lay mown with a neatness no man could match. The owner then found he could not take them away.
Earlier versions of this page added that neighbours saw the glow but were driven back by fear when they tried to approach. That detail does not appear in the title, and we could not find it in any source. We have removed it. The page also gave a count of ten witnesses. The pamphlet names none.
The woodcut
The illustration shows a dark, horned figure with a scythe. He stands in a field and cuts the oats in a curved band, leaving a ring or oval of stalks. Like most pamphlet woodcuts of the time it is crude.
The skeptical writer Benjamin Radford, writing in Skeptical Inquirer in 2020, points out a simple problem for the crop circle reading. A scythe cuts stalks. Modern crop circles are made of stalks bent flat and left alive. The picture shows the Devil doing ordinary harvest work, only faster and better than a man.
How it became a crop circle
Modern crop circles appeared in southern England in the 1970s and drew wide attention in the 1980s. Researchers who believed the circles were natural or unexplained looked for earlier cases. According to Radford, John Michell and Bob Rickard wrote that the woodcut was “rediscovered in 1989” and then claimed as an early crop circle record. The image spread quickly through circle books and magazines.
Not every circle researcher accepted it. The writer Jim Schnabel did not treat it as a precedent, because the text describes cutting, not flattening. Radford notes that Colin Andrews, one of the best-known circle researchers, later agreed the story “can be dismissed as pure fiction.” Radford also notes that the researcher Lucy Pringle dated the woodcut to 1687. The pamphlet itself says 1678.
The case for and against
Those who see a link point to the shape in the woodcut, the overnight timing and the strange light. Hertfordshire is not far from the Wiltshire and Hampshire fields where modern circles cluster.
The case against is stronger. The text describes a mown field, not a pattern. The pamphlet names no farmer, place or witness. Its story is a familiar moral tale. A man who swears by the Devil gets what he asked for and loses his crop. There is no known record of anything like crop circles between 1678 and the twentieth century.
In 1991 Doug Bower and Dave Chorley told the press they had been making crop circles in England since the 1970s, and showed how. Radford notes they took their idea from reports of a “saucer nest” at Tully, Australia, in 1966. Other teams of circle makers followed. Most researchers now accept that modern circles are made by people. A minority still argue that some formations show features that people could not produce.
Reading the pamphlet in its own time
Pamphlets like this mixed news, rumour and sermon. Readers in 1678 saw the hand of God or the Devil in many ordinary events. A story about a grasping farmer and an infernal mower fits that pattern well. It may have grown from a real dispute over wages. It may have been invented to sell. We cannot tell, because the pamphlet gives nothing that could be checked.
What the Mowing-Devil does show is how an old image can gain a new meaning. A seventeenth-century warning against swearing became, in 1989, evidence in a twentieth-century debate. The pamphlet is real and contemporary. The event it describes is not independently recorded, so we class it as unverified.
Sources
- Wikipedia, Mowing-Devil - transcription of the pamphlet title, acreage and Jim Schnabel’s view
- Benjamin Radford, “Legend of the Mowing Devil”, Skeptical Inquirer, November/December 2020 - pamphlet date, woodcut analysis, the 1989 rediscovery, Colin Andrews and Lucy Pringle, Bower and Chorley
- University of Pennsylvania Libraries catalogue record, The mowing-devil, or Strange news out of Hartford-shire - early nineteenth-century facsimile reprint with the “August 22th. 1678” licence line