Crop circles. Very 1990s, or so I always thought. The era of late-night TV, camcorders, and men with planks insisting it was all a laugh. But it turns out the phenomenon is much older and far more tangled than the pop culture version most of us remember.
The Mowing Devil
Long before Wiltshire became synonymous with flattened wheat and weekend mystics, strange markings in fields were already being noticed and talked about. One of the earliest well-known references comes from 1678, when a pamphlet described the so-called “Mowing Devil”. According to the account, a field of oats was mysteriously cut down overnight into neat patterns after the farmer refused to pay his labourers. No aliens, no spacecraft… just confusion, fear, and a moral warning neatly wrapped in religious language.
If you push further back into the medieval period, things become less explicit but no less interesting. Medieval people were very aware of unusual rings and circles in grass and crops, though they explained them through folklore rather than investigation.
The Supernatural
Fairy rings were widely known and feared, believed to be places where fairies danced at night. Step inside one, and trouble would follow. These circular marks, often caused by fungi, were accepted as part of a supernatural landscape rather than something to be measured or challenged.
Manorial records from the Middle Ages sometimes mention unexplained crop damage where no storm, flood, or grazing animal could be blamed. These entries are usually brief and practical, noting loss rather than speculation, but they show that odd patterns in fields were observed and recorded, even if no effort was made to explain them in detail.
By the Tudor period, attitudes began to shift. Strange signs in fields were increasingly interpreted as divine warnings. England was a country obsessed with omens, especially during times of religious upheaval, poor harvests, and political tension. Unusual markings in crops could be read as messages from God, signs of judgement, or reminders of moral order. The language changed, but the unease remained.
The Modern Concept
What really changed in the modern era was not the appearance of crop circles, but the way they were discussed. Printing, mass media, and later television turned local oddities into national talking points. By the late 20th century, circles became more complex, more geometric, and far more public. Some were admitted hoaxes. Others were never fully explained, which only fuelled debate.
So crop circles did not suddenly appear in the 1990s. That decade simply gave them an audience, a soundtrack, and a camera crew. Fields have been doing strange things for centuries… we just keep finding new ways to argue about why.
