The Church of England's ruling synod is due to return to the women bishops debate, with little chance of major concessions to traditionalists.

Little remains to limit the power of women bishops in the legislation under consideration on Monday. But objectors say they have not given up trying to gain exemptions from serving under women bishops. Proposals to create a class of male-only bishops to oversee traditionalist parishes were rejected on Saturday.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, had put their personal prestige behind the compromise plan, which would have allowed parishes unwilling to serve under a woman bishop to call upon the oversight of a male alternative. It would also have given that alternative bishop considerable legally-backed independence and autonomy as part of a "joint jurisdiction" over those parishes.

Liberal Anglicans opposed the plan as reducing women bishops to "second class" status by undermining their authority.

Growing impatience among supporters of the ordination of women as bishops meant that the archbishops took a gamble by putting their names to a compromise proposal that seemed likely to fail.

The proposal gained a majority of votes in the synod as a whole, but failed because clergy - who vote separately from lay people and bishops - defeated it by just five votes.

One senior figure, the Bishop of Winchester Michael Scott-Joynt, said the true significance of the vote lay in the fact that a majority of the synod had accepted it.

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