At Pagan and at main provincial centres, Buddhist temples supported an increasingly sophisticated Pali scholarship, which specialised in grammar and philosophical-psychological ("abhidhamma") studies, and which reportedly won the admiration of Sinhalese experts. Besides religious texts, Pagan's monks read works in a variety of languages on prosody, phonology, grammar, astrology, alchemy, and medicine, and developed an independent school of legal studies. Most students, and probably the leading monks and nuns, came from aristocratic families. At any rate, local illiteracy probably prevented the sort of detailed village censuses and legal rulings that became a hallmark of post-1550 Toungoo administration.