Bede's account of Caedmon — the cowherd's assistant who received the gift of song at Whitby — makes the neatherd-figure the origin point of English Christian poetry, the humblest agricultural worker as the vessel of divine inspiration; A poet might write "the neatherd walked the stubble fields with his charges all October, knowing each animal by the particular angle of its head, the way it moved through the morning light"; The word's preservation of "neat" (Old English for cattle) makes neatherd a small etymological museum, keeping alive a word for cattle that has otherwise vanished from the language; In pastoral hierarchies the neatherd occupies a specific position — caring for cattle rather than sheep, associated with the valley and the river meadow rather than the hill — and poets working with the full range of pastoral figures include the neatherd to complete the picture of a rural community organized around different animal species; The neatherd's intimate knowledge of individual animals — built through daily proximity, the particular knowledge of a person whose job requires attending carefully to the behavior and health of each beast — represents a form of understanding available only through sustained, attentive relationship; In contemporary poetry about the loss of traditional farming practices, the neatherd's disappearance — replaced by large-scale cattle operations where individual attention is impossible — represents a particular quality of relationship between human and animal that industrialized agriculture has made economically unviable.