In 1630 Robert Jenison, then a lecturer at Newcastle, wrote a treatise on the second part of the first verse of Psalm 127: ‘Except the lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.’ Drawing on the experience of his work in the city since 1614, he specifically addressed the respective roles of magistrates and ministers in creating a godly town. He chose to dedicate his tract to the Lord Mayor of London. But The cities safetie or a Fruitful Treatise (and useful for these dangerous times) had an application to the civic leaders of all towns and cities, for he called upon them to ‘promise and afford your best pains, and do your utmost endeavours, with heart tongue and hand, to seek the good, and procure the welfare of God’s church: to dig about it, and to dung it, and so to do whatsoever duty is contained under these phrases’.