 The story of Noah and the flood, the third play in the Chester cycle, was originally performed by the city's Guild of the Drawers of Dee, otherwise known as the water-carriers.A feature of this play, observed by the historian Rosemary Woolf, is the depiction of Noah's wife, and by implication women generally, as disobedient, obdurate and finally abusive, in contrast to the "grave and obedient" Noah and his patient sons.By the latter part of the 16th-century Reformation, the Church had grown less tolerant of mystery plays.