The 1678 "Mowing Devil" of Hertfordshire England: History's First Viral News Story and the Birth of the Crop Circle Mystery

 In pubs and in farmer’s fields throughout the south of England in the late Summer and throughout the Fall of 1678 parchment broadsides, hastily folded paper pamphlets, were passed furtively from hand to hand.  These pamphlets were read in secret by everyone who could read at all during hastily snatched moments of respite from back-breaking labor, or they were read aloud from town squares for all to hear and for the benefit of the multitudes, many of whom were all but illiterate.

During this unique moment in the late 17th century--at the birth of what would become the forerunner to print media--the story of the so-called “Mowing Devil” was going viral across all of England.

The pamphlet which caused such a stir was entitled The Mowing Devil: Or,  Strange News Out of Hart-fordshire.  It was only five pages long in total and, even today, no one is certain whether any part of The Mowing Devil was true, or even intended to be true at all, but this small pamphlet certainly did tell of news that was, if true, most strange and unusual indeed.

What made this pamphlet such a news sensation, at a time when there were dozens of pamphlets in circulation, each of which purported to tell the most up to date and sensational news stories around, usually with some kind of moral lesson thrown in for good measure, was the fact that the Mowing Devil was accompanied by a woodcut engraving.  

This picture showed what appeared to be a small little satanic-like horned creature cutting a perfectly symmetrical circle in a farmer’s field of crops with a grim-reaper like scythe.  This image was most likely mind-blowing for those who saw it in 1678, and even those who could read were not just a little bit terrified by the image that they saw atop the pamphlet entitled The Mowing Devil: Or, Strange News Out of Hart-fordshire.  It was the image of a devil hacking out history’s first recorded crop circle that made even those who couldn’t read desperate to find someone who could read aloud to them to discover the horrific truth in the words written in this pamphlet.

It’s a short pamphlet and it begins innocuously enough with a dispute over labor between farmers--an all too common occurrence throughout history where land and crops equaled money.

In The Mowing Devil pamphlet there’s a juxtaposition--a class rivalry if you will--between a rich farmer and his poorer neighbor who is barely scraping by.  The wealthy farmer, seeing that his crop of oats is ready to be harvested but not willing to do any harsh manual labor himself,  approaches his poorer neighbor and asks him to mow them.

Faced with such a proposition, the poor farmer begins to earnestly negotiate with his wealthy neighbor.  He requests that he receive a decent wage for, “The sweat of my brow and the marrow of my bones.”

The wealthy farmer is frustrated by his neighbor’s negotiation tactics and he believes the price that he is asking is too high.  So, the wealthy neighbor counters with a much lower monetary offer for the mowing of his oats.    

   But, the negotiations continue.  The neighbor tells the wealthy farmer that he is willing to do the work at a yet lower price than he had originally asked, but the wealthy farmer is obstinate and refuses to offer any more money.  The wealthy farmer ends up declaring that he will have “The Devil himself mow his oats!”  before he will, “Have any dealings with his poor sorrowful yeoman neighbor ever again!”

At this point, the Mowing Devil pamphlet of 1678 does regress into almost Puritanical moralizing by stating overtly that the rich farmer has forgotten about the Christian duty of the wealthy to meet the needs of their less fortunate neighbors, but after several paragraphs of obvious pontificating, the Mowing Devil pamphlet takes a more interesting turn, one that has fascinated researchers into the paranormal and UFOlogy for almost four centuries.

That very night in August of 1678, according to what purported to be the most reliable news source of the time and to hundreds of witnesses who lived in the villages and towns of Hertfordshire only a few miles outside of London--that same farmer’s fields of oats were said to be ablaze and to have lit up the night sky from dusk until dawn.

Out of fear--the farmer himself and residents who lived nearby dared not go out of doors that night--but in the morning when the farmer awoke and went out to his fields of oats, as reported in the pamphlet, he did not find his crop of oats burned and incinerated, but rather, he saw them, “Most unusually felled…as if the Devil had a mind to shew his dexterity in the art of husbandry…he cut them in round circles and placed every straw with exactness.”

It was said in the pamphlet that the Devil himself had placed the oats in a circle with such precise exactness that the farmer was too afraid to even touch them or set foot upon his own field again.

Clearly, The Mowing Devil was intended to give a moral lesson to wealthy landowners in the 17th century about the nature of charity and an honest day’s labor at a fair rate--but could it have also been the first recorded English language account in history of the occurrence of crop circles?  Was The Mowing Devil more than just a quaint moralistic tale of 17th century folklore and could it have actually been a reliable primary news source for a real-life supernatural or extraterrestrial unexplainable event that actually occurred in the Summer of 1678?

Well, the answer to those questions is--probably not.  A quick internet search will tell anyone that pamphlets which purported to be “newspapers” in late 17th century England were notoriously unreliable; based upon rumor, word of mouth and pure speculation and that even those who read or heard them at the time (which encompassed nearly everyone) were wary of their veracity so that, many who read and heard about the Mowing Devil probably simply ignored the whole thing and chalked it up to being just another overly moralistic tale, albeit an entertaining one, that had been foisted upon them by proselytizers and the Puritan community.

However, though The Mowing Devil pamphlet of August 1678 most definitely cannot be considered a purely “true” historical account by modern standards--it is very interesting to note that people in 17th century England would have been well acquainted already with the mysterious phenomenon of what were dubbed “Crop Circles” in the latter half of the 20th century.

During the 1970’s and 80’s reports of crop circles---mysterious shapes in perfect symmetry of flattened crops of unknown origin that appeared as if by magic overnight--swept like wildfire across all of the United Kingdom and the United States.  Reports of these “Crop Circles” went just as viral between 1970 and 1990 as The Mowing Devil pamphlet had in 1678 and the viral nature of the phenomena of Crop Circles during the 1980s coincided with a time in western Europe and the United States when interest in UFOs and the possibility of extraterrestrial life was just beginning to sky rocket in popular culture.

Since the late 1990’s most crop circles have been proven to be hoaxes--done with rather rudimentary tools in the middle of the night by attention seeking pranksters who wish to stir up the UFO community---and even the hoaxers themselves have stepped forward to claim responsibility and gain credit for their work as art, not unlike the same way in which graffiti artists will tag their own creations to gain credit for what they do in more urban environments.  

But still, not all Crop Circles have been explained, and not every single one of them could be said to have a truly explainable origin.  And, isn’t it wild to think that the same exact thing that perplexes skeptics and believers alike today had people dumbfounded, and had news going viral (even if it might have been “fake” news) as far back as 1678?