From their inception, the military orders had an ambiguous status that led contemporaries to confuse whether they were secular or monastic, and this still perplexes historians today. Anthony Luttrell has pointed out that although professed members were religious and the brethren took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and followed a rule approved by the papacy, they were not strictly speaking monks or canons. Neither, he continues, were they knights in the secular sense. Knightbrethren were always a minority of the total membership. He concludes that there is ‘no tidy classification of a military order’. Recent research by Cunich, moreover, has challenged the traditional view that monks took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, as they do today. Those vows were principally taken by mendicant friars, and the majority of monks and regular canons took vows only of stability, conversion of life and obedience. The Rule of Hospitaller Master Raymond de Puy (1120–60) had committed all brethren to chastity, obedience (that is, to obey whatever their superiors commanded), and to live without property of their own. Yet even at this early stage in the Order's existence, there was provision for exception to the Rule. For example, the Rule stated that those who fornicated in secret should do penance in secret, a penance they imposed on themselves. It was only those who broke their vow of chastity with public knowledge, and thus brought dishonour on the Order, who were punished.