In 1568 the Suprema rebuked the Barcelona tribunal for condemning to public scourging penitents reconciled for heresy. This, it said, was contrary to the _estilo_ of the Inquisition, and in future the lash was not to be used unless there was some other crime than heresy.[362] This indicates how completely the scourge had become punitive and how it was dissociated from the ancient discipline, but if such regulation existed it met with scant recognition. All the offences subjected to the Inquisition were constructively heretical, and there never seems to have been any discrimination exercised between them. Indeed, we have seen that the lash was especially indicated for heretics who were tardy or variable in their confessions, and Judaizers are constantly seen to be subjected to it. [Sidenote: _SCOURGING_] Scourging was a favorite penalty which was lavishly and often mercilessly employed. In the Saragossa auto of June 6, 1585, out of a total of seventy-nine penitents, twenty-two were scourged; in that of Valencia, in 1607, of forty-seven penitents, twenty-four received the lash.[363] This, however, exceeds the average. The Toledo reports, from 1575 to 1610, present a hundred and thirty-three cases of scourging which, allowing for a break in the record, give about four per annum.[364] On the other hand, a collection of autos de fe celebrated between 1721 and 1727, embracing in all nine hundred and sixty-two cases, affords two hundred and ninety-seven sentences of scourging, or about thirty per cent.[365] When we recall that, in the list of officials reported by Murcia, in 1746, there figures Joseph García Bentura as _notario de açotaciones_--a notary of scourgings--to keep record of the stripes, with a salary of about 2500 reales, we realize how prominent a feature it was in inquisitorial penology.[366] The brutalizing effect on the populace of these wholesale exhibitions of flogging, especially of women, can readily be estimated. The usual number of lashes prescribed was two hundred, though in occasional cases a hundred sufficed. In the two hundred and ninety-seven just alluded to, two hundred and ninety were of two hundred lashes and only seven of one hundred. It was rare that two hundred were exceeded in any one infliction, though sometimes it was mercilessly duplicated, as in the Seville auto of September 24, 1559, Martin Fernando Saldrian, a shepherd, for blasphemy was scourged in Seville and again in his native town; Alonso Martin of Carmona, for Lutheranism, was scourged in both Seville and Carmona and Juan de Aragon of Málaga, who had pretended to be a familiar, was scourged in Málaga and again in the scene of his offence.[367]