 Moreover, reforming bishops found they faced intractable opposition when urging the heads of religious houses to enforce rigorous observation of their monastic rules; especially in respect of requiring monks and nuns to remain within their cloisters.Monks and nuns in almost all late medieval English religious communities, although theoretically living in religious poverty, were nevertheless paid an annual cash wage ("peculium") and were in receipt of other regular cash rewards and pittances; which accorded considerable effective freedom from claustral rules for those disinclined to be restricted by them.Religious superiors met their bishops' pressure with the response that the austere and cloistered ideal was no longer acceptable to more than a tiny minority of regular clergy, and that any attempt on their part to enforce their order's stricter rules could be overturned in counter-actions in the secular courts, were aggrieved monks and nuns to obtain a writ of praemunire.