The hierarchy, although, as we have seen, debarred from directly inflicting such penalties as death or amputation of members, resorted to many forms of corporal punishment. Floggings for penance or discipline were administered frequently;[381] the younger monks in the monasteries commonly received thirty-nine stripes.[382] But the bishops had other and worse penalties in reserve, and, unlike the secular rulers, they employed imprisonment as a means of punishment in itself. The Catholic Church, with its ideals of cloistral life and ascetic seclusion, sought to produce remorse through mental affliction, and in its high-walled abbeys and gloomy courts had buildings ready to immure any one. The first cells were among the _exedrae_ round churches and bishops’ houses and were called the _decanica_,[383] while refractory monks were freely imprisoned in the great monasteries.[384] Though the ecclesiastical punishments[385] were accounted generally merciful—as we shall see presently from English comments on them—they could be pitiless enough on occasions, especially against heretics. The secret and dreadful Inquisition had its own prisons,[386] in which it tortured its victims by every means that subtlety could suggest, and in which the mind-wrecking results of solitary confinement were probably first discovered, and at any rate utilised. Already back in the thirteenth century the authorities had frowned on prison association.[387] In 1229 a Council of Toulouse ordered that the “converted” heretics (_i.e._ those who had recanted from the fear of execution, and who were even then sentenced to imprisonment for life; _vide_ Lea, on Laws of Frederic II., Bull of Gregory IX., etc., in his _Middle Ages_, i. pp. 321, 484) should be kept from corrupting others. The new prisons built for the Church and the Inquisition[388] were ordered to have small dark dungeons for solitary confinement. In 1246 a Council of Beziers[389] ordered that the captives should be kept separate in secret cells, so that no one might corrupt another. It speaks of the “enormis rigor carceris.” The prisoners of the Church[390] were subjected to various kinds of incarceration. There was the _Murus Largus_, under which they were allowed about the place;[391] the _Murus Strictus_, _Durus_, or _Arctus_, by which they were supposed to be confined in separate cells upon bread and water;[392] and the _Murus Strictissimus_, where they were kept in dungeons and in heavy irons.[393] The Inquisition employed, besides, innumerable torments, and could learn little from the imaginings of Dante; but that dread organisation has a history of its own. Apart from it, the bishops[394] possessed their prisons, and the great convents had penal cells,[395] and these they would use to inflict penance or punishment.[396] Thus at Canossa, in 1077, Pope Gregory VII.[397] consigned the rebellious German prelates to solitary cells with bread and water dietary.