In 1647, Juan del Cerro, of Ciudad Rodrigo, was a prisoner in the royal gaol of Valladolid. Apparently hoping for release, he denounced himself to the Inquisition and told a story of a congregation of Jews at Ciudad Rodrigo, which met every Friday in the house of the president, Pablo de Herrera, paymaster of the army on the Portuguese frontier, when the ceremony of scourging images of Christ and the Virgin was performed and then, during Holy week, they were burnt. Numerous arrests were made and the trials dragged on until 1651; torture was employed, parents and children, brothers and sisters testified against each other, but there were no pertinacious impenitents or negativos and none were relaxed. That Juan del Cerro's story of the outrages on the sacred images was recognized as fictitious is evident from the suspension of ten of the cases, including those of the so-called officers of the congregation, but the tribunal secured a satisfactory number of convictions, as well as fines amounting to thirty-seven hundred ducats. Juan del Cerro made nothing by his device for, though he was not prosecuted for false-witness, when the trials were over in 1651, he was handed back to the royal court.[811] Toledo was equally active for, in an auto held the same year, it had thirty-two Judaizers in person and thirty effigies of fugitives.[812] Nearly the whole of these were Portuguese for, by this time, Castilian Judaizers were of comparatively rare occurrence. In the great Seville auto of 1660, out of eighty-one Judaizers, nearly all Portuguese, a group of thirty-seven were from Osuna and another of eight from Utrera. There were forty-seven reconciled, seven relaxed in person and twenty-seven in effigy.[813]