In the prefatory illustration of John Blaxton's The English Usurer, a usurer sits at his desk counting coins, a scale beside him, a contract in hand, surrounded by locked boxes, a devil perched upon the back of his chair. ‘I say I will haue all both Use & principall’, he declares, while in the second panel we see two pigs wallowing in the mud. The pig says, ‘Mine is the Vsurers desire, | To roote in earth, wallow in Mire’, ‘Liuing spare me, and Dead share me.’ Beside the image, Blaxton describes how ‘Rich men by others sweat augment their pounds: | The Hog's still rooting in the neighbours grounds.’ The swinish usurer, groping insatiably in the muck for coin, growing rich off others, abject and omnivorous, is a popular trope. See how, in John Lane's Tom Tel-Troths Message, usurers are ‘greedie hogs that on mens grounds do dwell’, whereas for Thomas Adams, ‘the covetous thinke Prodigum Prodigium, the Spender a wonder: and the prodigall thinke Parcum Porcum, the niggard a hogge.’ The titular Hog of The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl who preys on a prodigal is so named for the swinish association with usury and a ‘sturdie hogge’ represents usurers in a parodic crest. And as the epigraphic Nashe quotation suggests, this swinish usurer could be easily found among those hogs fed by the destitute prodigal.

Such a reading collapses Luke 15.13 and 15.15, with the usurer occupying the position both of those who used up the prodigal's patrimony and of the swine he was then reduced to feed