These three documents, the Constitutions of Ottobon and of Peckham and the Bull _Periculoso_, were the standard decrees on the subject of the claustration of nuns in England and were used as a model by visitors in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. William of Wykeham, for example, in the exceptionally full and formal injunctions which he sent to Romsey and to Wherwell in 1387 continually refers by name to Ottobon and to Peckham, and the wording of the Bull _Periculoso_ is followed _verbatim_ in the mandate directed by Bishop Grandisson of Exeter to Canonsleigh in 1329 and in the commission sent by his successor Bishop Brantyngham to two canons of Exeter in 1376, concerning the wanderings of the nuns of Polsloe. But a study of the visitation documents of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries makes it clear that the nuns never really made any attempt to obey the regulations which imposed a strict enclosure upon them; and that the bishops upon whom fell the brunt of administering _Periculoso_ themselves allowed a considerable latitude, directing their efforts towards regulating the conditions under which nuns left their convents, rather than to keeping them within the precincts. _Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien_ and the steady opposition of the nuns forced a compromise upon their visitors. The canonist John of Ayton, reciting the decrees of Ottobon and of Boniface, with their injunction that bishops shall "cause them to be observed," exclaims Cause to be observed! But surely there is scarce any mortal man who could do this: we must therefore here understand "so far as lieth in the prelate's power." For the nuns answer roundly to these statutes or to any others promulgated against their wantonness, saying "In truth the men who made these laws sat well at their ease, while they laid such burdens upon us by these hard and intolerable restrictions!" Wherefore we see in fact that these statutes are a dead letter or are ill-kept at the best. Why, then, did the holy fathers thus labour to beat the air? Yet indeed their toil is none the less to their own merit; for we look not to that which is but to that which of justice should be[1101].