In the Discworld series of novels, Sam Vimes is the curmudgeonly but incorruptible captain of the City Watch of the medieval city-state of Ankh-Morpork. The boots theory comes from a passage of the 1993 novel Men at Arms, the second novel to focus on the City Watch, in which he muses about his experiences of poverty as compared to his fiancée Lady Sybil Ramkin's conception of poverty: