The parable of the Prodigal Son, who is reduced to tending swine before returning to his father, establishes the swineherd as the lowest point of social descent — the humble occupation that marks the end of pride and the beginning of repentance; A poet might write "the swineherd knew his pigs by name and by habit — their individual characters as clear to him as the faces of the villagers who avoided his company for the smell he carried with him from the wood"; Hans Christian Andersen's tale of the prince disguised as a swineherd continues the tradition of hidden nobility in the lowliest pastoral occupation — the swineherd as the aristocrat in disguise that the shallow world cannot recognize; In the medieval social hierarchy of pastoral occupations, the swineherd occupies the lowest position — below the goatherd, the shepherd, and the cowherd — and this hierarchy is reflected in the literary tradition where the swineherd is the figure of maximum humility; The swineherd's occupation in woodland pannage — moving with his pigs through the autumn forest as they fed on mast — places him in the overlap between the domestic and the wild, the agricultural and the woodland, that the forest represents; In poems about the democratic basis of wisdom, the swineherd who knows his animals intimately contrasts with the aristocrat who knows only the surface of things — the deep knowledge available through humble, attentive labor versus the shallow knowledge available through privilege and leisure.