Trying to understand how contemporary conversos experienced the Inquisition means getting through the histories that have grown up about it. There is no doubt that conversos were persecuted and for victims it was a dreadful experience, but was the persecution of conversos worse than the persecution of religious minorities elsewhere? England is generally thought of as a place of tolerance, unlike 'extremist' Catholic Iberia and yet in the period 1530-1680 633 people were brutally executed for heresy (283 Catholics and 350 Protestants) an average of 4.2 per annum. In Portugal there were some 1200 executions in the period 1536-1798, a comparable 4.8 per annum. Execution for heresy was a fact of everyday life throughout Europe.