Sometimes similar rights to these were exercised by private persons, who held the patronage of a house or with whom it was connected by special ties; the family of le Rous of Imber, for example, had the right (resigned in 1313) of presenting two nuns, with a valet, to Romsey Abbey[599]. But the royal rights were always the most burdensome and, though such privileges as those described above, and the even more burdensome right to demand corrodies and pensions, normally affected only great abbeys such as Barking, Romsey, St Mary's Winchester, and Shaftesbury, the smaller houses (not under royal patronage) were not always exempt from sudden demands--witness the case of Polsloe below--and a wide range of nunneries was affected by archiepiscopal and episcopal rights. Moreover even the great houses, in spite of their large endowments, were crippled by the system, as may be gathered from their constant complaints of poverty and of overcrowding. The obligation to receive fresh inmates by nomination was especially burdensome when it was incurred on more than one occasion by the same house and coincided with other exactions. The case of Shaftesbury is noticeable in this connection; the King claimed the right to administer its temporalities during voidance, to nominate a nun on his own coronation and on the election of an Abbess, to demand a pension for one of the royal clerks on the latter occasion, and to send boarders or corrodians for maintenance; and the Bishop of Salisbury could nominate a nun on his own promotion to the see and could demand a benefice for one of his clerks on the election of an Abbess. It is, of course, possible that all these prerogatives were not invariably exercised and that a new inmate was not sent to Shaftesbury every time a King was crowned, a Bishop consecrated or an Abbess elected; but it was exercised sufficiently often to be a strain upon the house.