THE SCARECROW

During the Middle Ages in Britain and Europe, small children worked as crow-scarers. Their job was to run around in the fields, clapping blocks of wood together to frighten away birds that might eat the grain.
When the Black Plague wiped out nearly the entire populations of some towns, it was said that the living spent most of their time burying the dead in mass graves:

“We see death coming into our midst like black smoke, a plague which cuts off the young, a rootless phantom which has no mercy or fair countenance.”
~Jeuan Gethin, Welsh poet

So with a scarcity of children, farmers resorted to stuffing old clothes with straw, placing a turnip or gourd on top, and mounting the figures in the fields… essentially the first European scarecrows.
—The Scarecrow (1925) Douglas Percy Bliss