The Mowing-Devil: Strange News out of Hartford-shire (1678)

The Mowing-Devil: or, Strange News out of Hartford-shire is an anonymous English pamphlet dated August 22, 1678. Eight pages, folded quarto. It names no parish, village or farm. The farmer and the mower are never named. The story happens simply in "Hartford-shire", Hertfordshire, during the oat harvest.

A "Rich industrious Farmer" asks a poor neighbour to mow three half acres of oats. The mower asks a little above the usual rate, for "the sweat of his brows and marrow of his bones". The farmer offers less. The mower lowers his price. The farmer still refuses. And he swears "that the Devil himself should Mow his Oats before he should have anything to do with them."

That same night, the field was "publickly beheld by several Passengers to be all of a Flame, and so continued for some space." Next morning the farmer came to his oats. Nothing had burned. The crop was cut down, ready to his hands. "He cut them in round Circles, and plac't every straw with that exactness that it would have taken up above an Age, for any Man to perform what he did that one night."

The pamphlet credits "the Devil, or some Infernal Spirit." No one in the text sees him. The woodcut does. A small, plump devil stoops with a scythe, working inward through blazing oats in concentric rings. And the harvest stays where it fell. The owner, says the title page, "has not Power to fetch them away."

In 1679 a follow-up, Strange newes out of Hartfordshire and Kent, was printed for R.S., without the woodcut. Three centuries passed. Then came 1989, and the height of the crop-circle craze.

Early October 1989. Fortean Times correspondent Bob Skinner found the woodcut reproduced in Bygone Hertfordshire at a Surrey flea market. He sent photocopies to researchers and to editor Bob Rickard. Late that year, local historian Betty Puttick sent a copy to ufologist Jenny Randles. Randles had folklorists confirm it was genuine and published it in a folklore journal. Cereologists hailed it as among the first recorded cases of crop circles.

Not everyone agreed. Jim Schnabel noted that these stalks were cut, while modern circles are flattened or bent. Benjamin Radford, writing in the Skeptical Inquirer in 2020, read the woodcut as an illustration of folklore rather than an eyewitness crop circle.

Historians looked past the circles. The Mercurius Politicus blog saw a cautionary tale about class relations in rural England. The Public Domain Review saw the Devil become an instrument of justice for the poor man. Patrick Gross pointed out that a field that burned could not also be found neatly harvested. For Brett Holman, the lesson was cultural: "more interesting than what people might have really seen, is what they believed they saw."

Copies survive, one of them at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. The pamphlet was never exposed as a hoax. It reads best as moral fiction dressed as news. Yet it sits firmly in crop-circle lore, beside the 1991 confession of Doug Bower and Dave Chorley. And its woodcut is still called the oldest known image of a crop circle.