The place of burning--the quemadero or brasero--as a rule was outside of the city. With this the tribunal had nothing to do, except that a secretary and alguazil were present to certify and report as to the execution of the sentences.[639] Consequently the documents of the Inquisition furnish no details, but some may be gleaned from a relation of the Madrid auto of 1632. For this occasion the city had constructed the brasero beyond the Puerta de Alcalá; as there were seven to be burnt, it was made fifty feet square, and had the requisite stakes with garrotes. The confusion and crowd were great, and so also was the fire, which lasted until eleven o'clock at night, by which time the bodies were reduced to ashes, so that the memory of the impious might vanish from the earth.[640] The scattering of the ashes over the fields, or into running water, was a prescription of old standing, to prevent disciples of heresiarchs from preserving fragments to be venerated as relics. This was not an easy matter, for the total calcination of a human skeleton requires a prolonged intensity of heat not likely to be maintained where wood was expensive, and the bones found with the cinders on the site of the old quemadero of Madrid, when, about 1868, the Calle de Carranza was cut through it, would indicate that part, at least, of the remains of the victims were allowed to lie where they had perished. * * * * * [Sidenote: _THE AUTO PARTICULAR_] The _auto público general_, while looming large in popular imagination, represented, in truth, but a small part of inquisitorial activity. It was a solemnity on a grand scale, in which the Holy Office magnified its importance, but by far the greater number of cases were despatched in _autos particulares_ or _autillos_, held in churches, or in the audience-chamber, or anywhere that circumstances might dictate. In the Toledo record, from 1575 to 1610, there are contained but twelve autos generales, in which three hundred and eighty-six culprits appeared, while seven hundred and eighty-six cases were settled in autos particulares.[641] As stated above, appearance in a public auto was, in itself, a severe punishment, and the sentence always specified whether the offender was to be subjected to a humiliation entailing consequences on him and his family so greatly dreaded that, at a Toledo auto of December 13, 1627, Juan Nuñez Saravia, a wealthy Portuguese, vainly offered twelve thousand ducats to escape it.[642] The great majority of cases deserved no such severity. The jurisdiction of the Inquisition extended over a wide field; it was, in a certain sense, a _custos morum_ and took cognizance of a vast number of comparatively trivial offences--careless speeches, blasphemies, propositions of all kinds, indecent writings and works of art, sorceries and conjurations more or less innocent and the like--which it disposed of without summoning the entire population as spectators. Clerical offenders,