but it is not so easy to understand the absence of alguazils, of whom at least one would seem to be necessary to each tribunal. There are many honorary officials and others serving without pay, while still others are _jubilado_ or retired, especially among the secretaries and, where there are two receivers, one is jubilado or absent. The paucity of keepers of penitential prisons shows that that punishment had become practically obsolete. With the absence of confiscations the _juez de bienes_ has disappeared, except in Majorca. The blanks in the returns of familiars, although information concerning them had specially demanded, may be due either to the tribunals keeping no registers of them, or to concealment of the fact that the numbers allowed by the Concordias were exceeded. That there were serious omissions, indeed is proved when we consider that the total aggregate reported is only 951, while the census of 1769 gives 2645 as the number of those admitted to exemption through connection with the Inquisition. During the interval between this and the next census in 1787, strenuous and successful efforts were made to diminish the number of exempts, in spite of which the employees of the Inquisition had increased to 2705.[580] Surveying the table as a whole it will be perceived that the higher offices of inquisitors and secretaries had rather increased than diminished from the standard set by Valladares in 1667. Yet there was virtually no serious work for them to do. Their predecessors had successfully enforced unity of faith and little remained except to repress all freedom of thought and aspiration for improvement. How they earned their salaries by laborious trifling is exemplified, in 1808, when three inquisitors and an inquisitor-fiscal of the Valencia tribunal pottered for eighteen months over the case of a poor laboring woman accused of "supersticiones," because she had suggested certain charms to some of her neighbors, and finally concluded to suspend it and to order her parish priest to reprimand and threaten her.[581]