Traditionally, Europeans were faced with two types of threats, which people feared could take their crops - or at least the crucial "essence" of their crops. These weren't monsters of the sort that one might think, but the farmers regarded them as "monstrous" nevertheless.

The first were witches: people feared that neighbors might be wielding magical arts in such a way as to steal both milk from cows and the essential strength of crops. Neither of these magical efforts necessarily meant that the crop or the milk would be diminished in quantity. The real fear was that the witch would take the "good of it" so that when people consumed the milk or the crop they would receive any real nutrition from the meal. Sometimes the witch reduced the quantity of the milk, but this was not what happened to the crop.

Legends (stories told generally to be believed) described a farmer seeing a rabbit in the field during harvest. Farmers hated to see this because as they harvested a field, the crucial "essence" of the harvest was herded or chased into the last corner. If a witch's familiar in the form of a rabbit took the last grain of wheat, it could make off with the nutritious part of the entire field. Stories tell of a farmer hurling his scythe at the rabbit, cutting off a limb. He would then hear how an old woman in a neighboring village was seen missing an arm without explanation - proof of the attempted misdeed!

With the same idea in mind - the essential essence in the field - farmers were concerned that the local supernatural beings (elves, fairies, pixies, hidden folk, etc.) would attempt to steal the last part of the harvest so they, too, could enjoy the nutritious benefit of the entire harvest. There is a Scandinavian legend of a farmer who watched as a series of supernatural beings, one smaller than the next, were carrying stalks of grain away during harvest. The last one was so small that he could barely handle one seed from an ear of wheat. The farmer laughed at the little fellow and said that he was exerting a great deal of effort for so little a prize. The supernatural being responded that the farmer would be surprised to find how important that last bit of the harvest was - and the farmer did find, indeed, that the harvested wheat had no real value because of the theft.

Farmers often held rituals at the end of the harvest in which they bundled the last part of the harvest, tying it together as a "corn doll." These were intended to capture the essential part of the harvest and to keep it with the farmer's family for the rest of the year.

These were the two sources of the greatest fear of farmers. Not monsters, but definitely monstrous!