Notaries and nuncii are well-defined groups of staff with particular legal functions in respect of the tribunal of inquisition. But they formed only part of the inquisitor's wider support system. This included not only his familiares and servants, but also the jailers (custodes carceris) who secured prisoners; the exploratores or spie, who sniffed out heretical groups in places where the inquisitor could not expect co-operation; the bankers who managed the inquisition's substantial assets; and a host of individuals with more mundane tasks – fetching, carrying, mending shoes, holding horses, doctoring the inquisitor when he was sick, setting up the bleachers for his set-piece preaching and taking up and relaying the paving stones when there was an execution, so they would not be damaged. Then, of course, there was the slightly cloudy entity of the officiales.

This very diverse group is hard to number or characterise. We know much less about most of the individuals concerned, since many are unnamed and the precise nature of their relationship with the office – one-off or regular – is unknown. They mostly did not perform a function regulated by Church, bishop or commune, and the call for their services varied according to the practice of the individual inquisitor. Some inquisitors were perfectly straightforward about payments for torture (for example), whilst others make no explicit mention of it. We do not know what is concealed behind the numerous payments to ‘one who served the office’ or to the individuals surnamed Barberius who appear in many different sets of accounts and may have been surgeons, torturers, barbers or all three.

So far as possible, this chapter examines this support network and its variations from place to place. It analyses, first, what is actually meant by the inquisitor's familia and then looks in depth at two groups, the jailers and the exploratores, who are not generally considered part of the familia but without whose services the inquisition could not operate. A brief overview of some other bought-in services follows. Chapters 3 and 4 have demonstrated how closely the inquisition office was entwined with civic (and to some extent, conventual) arrangements; this analysis shows how much wider its relations went and how complex the organisational requirements quickly became.