In Norwich during the month of June 1556, a pageant was performed in honour of the mayor, Augustine Steward (then in his third stint in the office), which listed the virtues with which all civic leaders ought to be endowed. The pageant's author, a local grammar school master named Boucke, explained that Norwich surpassed ancient Rome in certain qualitative aspects, not least in the calibre of its governors. In electing Steward, Boucke went on to explain, the citizens had chosen a man destined to improve standards of human welfare. Steward's remit thus conceived included keeping the city fabric ‘in coomlye order’ and providing support for the genuinely sick and incapacitated (‘impotennte’) poor. Although the extent of the personal praise heaped upon Steward is surprising to modern readers accustomed to treating the motives of politicians with no small measure of scepticism, Boucke's wider concerns – about physical order, the righteous poor and the general good – were not original. He was drawing on an already old set of medico-political ideas which promoted the notion that decorum and cleanliness were necessary prerequisites for well-being: medieval ideas which had been reframed and aired in the works of reformers and in the activities of parliamentarians of the preceding generation. According to this philosophy, disease, illness and urban decay apparently interacted with, and dangerously aggravated, one another. A scheme proposed in parliament in 1535, for example, provided constructive solutions to the perceived evils of industrial collapse, the dilapidation of the urban fabric and the seeming arrival of swarms of unruly, disease-ridden paupers. The poor, it was suggested, could be employed in waged work upon various civic projects, including the ‘makyng of the comen high waies and … skowryng and clensyng of watercourses through the realme’. Such provisions, it was hoped, would not only bolster trade, but would also bring about better standards in health, not least owing to the ‘holsome’ bodily effects of labour on those thus employed. Furthermore, the labourers were to be given free, specialist medical help as necessary, and a reasonable wage.