As regards the first, the Inquisition adopted the rule of Roman law. If the accused, being cited three times or given one peremptory summons to appear, failed to do so, he was reckoned as contumacious. The penalty was excommunication and forfeiture of goods. This sentence would be annulled in the event of the accused’s surrendering himself to the tribunal within the space of a year from the date of the citation.[447] Otherwise, he was liable, on falling into the hands of the Inquisition, as an excommunicate, to be handed over to the secular arm. With the stubborn impenitent, resisting up to the last all efforts of the Church to bring him back to her bosom, there was obviously nothing to be done. But the inquisitor, to whom relaxation to the secular arm was an admission of defeat, left no means untried, of persuasion, admonition, force, to avoid such failure. His reluctance to hand over the heretic as a hopeless recalcitrant, was in most cases perfectly genuine. Even after the sentence of relaxation had been pronounced, indeed after the culprit had actually been handed over, the slightest sign of willingness to repent might suffice to save the victim.[448] Eymeric mentions one case in which a heretic, consigned to the flames at Barcelona, being scorched on one side, cried out in his agony that he would recant, and was at once removed from the fire.[449] The relapsed were those who, having once erred and been received back into communion, sinned in the same way again. These were incorrigible. Their former repentance had manifestly been a mere sham, and the outrage cried to heaven. Repetition of the sin of heresy could not be suffered.[450] Accordingly the relapsed were the only class of offenders coming before the Holy Office who could not save themselves by penitence. Relapse came to involve relaxation automatically. But it had not been so at first, perpetual imprisonment being the penalty originally enjoined, for example by the Councils of Tarragona and Béziers. By 1258, however, relaxation had come to be recognized as the sole possible reward for relapse.[451] Relaxation to the secular arm meant death, and death by burning. The inquisitor himself, who did not and could not pronounce a death sentence, knew, on the other hand, that a sentence of relaxation was tantamount to one of death.