In 1989, editors at the British paranormal magazine Fortean Times went looking for a historical precedent for the crop-circle craze and found one: a five-page pamphlet dated August 22, 1678, The Mowing-Devil: Or, Strange News out of Hartford-shire. Its woodcut frontispiece appears to be the oldest known depiction of a crop circle — and in the story, the circle is cut by the devil, hired in a wage dispute.

The plot is a labour dispute before it is anything supernatural:

  • A wealthy farmer’s oats are ready to harvest, so he asks his poor neighbour to mow them.
  • The mower names an honest price, a little above the going rate, for “the sweat of his brows and marrow of his bones.”
  • The farmer counters below market rate. The mower lowers his own quote out of a wish to serve; the farmer still refuses, telling him the devil himself should mow his oats before he deals with the “sorrowful Yeoman.”
  • That night the field is reported ablaze. By morning the oats are not burned but felled — “cut them in round Circles, and plac’t every straw with that exactness” no man could have managed.
  • The farmer is “as yet afraid to remove them.”

The pamphlet’s judgment falls on the farmer, not the devil. He has forgotten the Christian duty of the wealthy to meet the needs of their neighbours, and the devil becomes an instrument of retributive peasant justice. The tract even insists the moral matters more than any explanation: a crop circle is only one of many “hits of providence” — soil, showers, solstice, winds — that go into a single crop of corn.

What the text describes, without the vocabulary, is a moral economy: a wage set by custom and neighbourly obligation, defended against a farmer who wants the harvest below market price and receives a supernatural bill for it. As the PDR’s note puts it, the truly evil phenomenon in the story is “the way that early modern economy intrudes upon neighborly relations” — less the circle than the wage.

The punchline for the 1980s cereologists who combed the archives hoping for aliens: what they found was a seventeenth-century oat field where the devil sides with the underpaid worker.