Noah's Flood, the third pageant in the Chester Whitsun Plays, is attributed by both the Early and Late Banns to the Waterleaders and Drawers of Dee. The Early Banns instruct the two companies to ‘loke that noyes shippe be sett on hie | that you lett not the storye | And then shall you well cheue’. This advice is echoed, albeit in revised form, in the Late Banns, which instruct ‘The good simple Waterleaders & drawers of Dee | [to] See that in all poyntes your Arke be prepared | of Noe and his Chilldren the whole storie | And of the Vneuersall floode by you shall be playde’. A list of guilds and their associated pageants, contemporaneous with the Early Banns, also attributes the pageant to these companies, as do all five extant manuscripts of the Plays.

Whereas the Waterleaders supplied Chester's inhabitants with water, the Drawers of Dee were Chester's company of fishers, selling the city's inhabitants salmon and other fish drawn from the River Dee. However, the Banns’ association of ‘the good simple Waterleaders & drawers of Dee’ has been taken by many to indicate that the members of these two companies performed the same or very similar labour, namely that of the Waterleaders, the supply of water to Chester's inhabitants. This misconception perhaps rests on the understanding of ‘drawer’ as one who pulls water from a spring, well, or river. Amongst the earliest and most influential statements of this misunderstanding was that made by Rupert H. Morris, who explained that Chester's ‘citizens generally were supplied with unfiltered water from the Dee by the Waterleaders or Drawers of water, who formed a numerous body, and as late as 1587 considered themselves of importance enough to petition for a charter of incorporation’.

To Randle Holme III, the use of drawer to indicate fisher seemed sufficiently idiomatic to Chester that it required explication. In his 1688 Academy of Armory, he identified a woodcut depicting two ‘Fishers Drawing … a Salmons Nett out of the Water’ as ‘the Coat of Arms anciently belonging to the Company of Fishers, or Drawers in Dee (as we call them) in the City of Chester’ (see Fig. 1).