Elite Attitudes to the ‘Public Sphere’ in Fifteenth-Century Castile

ABSTRACT This article examines the manifold and complex responses of fifteenth-century elite politicians and writers to ‘public’ politics in Castile. Through analysis of a variety of sources including chronicles, allegorical poems, treatises, glosses and letters, it shows how the multiple conceptions of non-elite agency and attitudes to it can nuance our understanding of Castilian politics in the late Middle Ages. It argues that fifteenth-century chronicles, glosses and allegorical poems demonstrate a new attention from the elite to wider contexts beyond the confines of the traditional political society, which responded both to literary fashions and to real changes in the political reality of late medieval society. Moreover, their complex and even contradictory responses, which denigrated, appropriated and addressed these wider ‘publics’, ought to be considered integral to the development of ‘public opinion’, as part of a set of discursive and institutional struggles for the right to express political opinions.


Introduction
In 1464, a band of dissatisfied Castilian nobles led by Juan Pacheco, marqués of Villena, gathered in the major city of Burgos and began their rebellion against the king, Enrique IV (r.1454-1474).Their grievances focused on the king's elevation of Pacheco's rival, Beltrán de la Cueva, to the coveted post of Master of the military Order of Santiago, as well as a host of other perceived injustices and misgovernances.Though they had considered Burgos to be a safe haven from which to fight their cause, they were met with an uprising from the city's populace, who were suspicious of the 'novelty' of this noble alliance.What happened next, according to the royal chronicler, Diego Enríquez del Castillo, is of great interest in the study of the public in the late Middle Ages.We read: But the marqués of Villena, since he was cunning, began to gather the people, walking through the churches, talking to the townspeople and parishioners, and through the town squares where the great councils were held, appeasing and drawing them in with sweet and flattering explanations, saying that his men had not come to harm the city nor disturb the king, but only to remedy grave insults, serious crimes and tremendous grievances. 1 In this passage, we find the marqués doing what an increasing number of medieval historians would expect a fifteenth-century politician to do: appealing to a mass public.The 'public' has become an important conceptual tool for historians of many stripes: those interested in politics, certainly, but also a wider spectrum of social historians interested in topics ranging from the history of lower-class revolts to 'political communication'.This is a historiographical trend with its roots in many of the wider intellectual currents on the peninsula and beyond.As Spain emerged in the 1970s from dictatorship and strict high-political orthodoxy into an experimental world of democracy and openly socialist intellectuals, the history of subaltern revolts and class struggles was naturally appealing, and this led to a discussion about the breadth of political participation in medieval politics. 2Themes like 'propaganda' also suggested themselves, establishing connections between the world of kings and nobles and a wider 'public opinion'. 3Elsewhere in Europe, Marxist and social histories had similarly focused on class struggles and revolts, but gradually the agenda evolved towards the complexities of subaltern participation, communication and resistance, driven in part by the work of anthropologists like James C. Scott. 4 In recent years, historiographical debates across Europe have aligned and spoken more closely in dialogue, drawing out the patterns of rural and urban politics, identity and language in a variety of contexts. 5Thanks to this dialogue, we now have a much more thorough understanding of the nuances of resistance, gossip, cooperation and ideologies of people previously ignored or misunderstood, and each step appears to bring us closer to hearing the 'voices of the people' in late medieval politics.
As a result of this access to a world of mass opinion, communication and participation, historians have repeatedly turned to the work of Jürgen Habermas to conceptualise the broadness of participation, through his notion of the 'public sphere'.Habermas wrote that 'citizens behave as a public body when they confer in an unrestricted fashion', meaning that they had a guaranteed freedom of assembly and freedom of expression.A collection of private individuals could thus act and speak as a public body, and could informally or formally criticise and influence the organised ruling structure. 6hough Habermas intended to describe eighteenth-century France and England with these definitions, the concept has been critiqued and examined from the perspective of a variety of other periods and places, with some historians indicating that it has value 2 See e.g.María Isabel del Val Valdivieso, 'Resistencia al dominio señorial durante los últimos años del reino de Enrique IV', Hispania.Revista Española de Historia 126 (1974): 53-104; Julio Valdeón Baruque, Los conflictos sociales en el reino de Castilla en los siglos XIV y XV (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1975), 23; José María Monsalvo Antón, 'La participación política de los pecheros en los municipios castellanos de la Baja Edad Media.Aspectos organizativos', Studia histórica -Historia Medieval 7 (1989): 37-94. 3Julio Valdeón Baruque, 'La propaganda ideológica, arma de combate de Enrique de Trastámara (1366-1369)', Historia, Instituciones, Documentos 19 (1992): 459-68. 4 in relation to late medieval kingdoms like Castile. 7The notion of 'public opinion' can be defined as the speech or expression of an individual or group which was thought to have a wider implication for the polity than their own specific context, whether owing to its subject matter or the manner or place of its expression.Consequently, the 'public' is the group which legitimately expresses opinion or truth that applied to the whole political body.The literature on the medieval public has thus brought to our attention a kind of public (often linked to 'the people', 'the commons' and other words which invoke multiple members of the community) which could be mobilised at certain points, and which had various patterns of behaviour that make them indispensable for the study of political interaction in pre-modern Europe.
Returning to the case of Juan Pacheco, however, we can see that there might be further lines of enquiry that are not fully explored in this new discussion of the medieval public.In addition to an example of a politically engaged multitude in fifteenth-century Burgos, the chronicle narrative reveals multiple layers to the story.In addition to noticing the political relevance of the crowd, the chronicler's main point is to suggest it was a shrewd political move for an elite rebel, in this case Juan Pacheco, to speak personally with 'the people' in public spaces like churches and town squares, in order to persuade them of the legitimacy of his cause.At the same time as acknowledging the astuteness of the marqués, however, the royal chronicler was strongly opposed to the rebellion, and depicted such behaviour to present Pacheco as seditious and untrustworthy.This episode, which hints at the complexity of elite attitudes to certain types of political interaction, touches on important issues when thinking about the 'public' nature of Castilian politics in the fifteenth century.It asks what we should understand by 'the people' and 'the public', but also how any increasing 'pressure of the public' was recorded, reacted to and shaped by elite observers. 8he chronicler's account of Juan Pacheco and others like it are important because social historians have tended to read narrative sources for glimpses, however indirect, of the existence of 'public opinion' or the 'voice of the people'. 9This approach leaves several key questions unanswered.The first is methodological: are we missing something in chronicles and other sources of 'elite' origin if we mine for information about demotic voices but do not think about what the authors were saying and doing on their terms?This article aims to build on the insights of historians of popular politics by asking what kind of response the putative emergence of a 'public sphere' incited in those who already dominated political commentary, and what their attitudes tell us about how Habermas' model of a public sphere might actually apply to late medieval Castile.Indeed, an important, but under-acknowledged, implication of Habermas' argument is 7 Patrick Boucheron and Nicolas Offenstadt, L'espace public au moyen âge : Débats autour de Jürgen Habermas (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2011); Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer, Vincent Challet, Jan Dumolyn and María Antonia Carmona Ruiz, 'La comunidad medieval como esfera pública: algunas reflexiones previas', in La comunidad medieval como esfera pública, eds.Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer, Vincent Challet, Jan Dumolyn and María Antonia Carmona Ruiz (Seville: Editorial Universidad de Sevilla, 2014), 11-19 (12 that the distinction between something being 'popular', that is non-elite and perhaps widespread, and its being 'public', had as much to do with the perception of the observer as with the social and political context of its initial production.In the English case, for example, John Watts has shown how the representation of non-elite agents as ignorant rustics rather than the 'true commons' was one way in which elites responded to demands for representation. 10However, the ambivalence on display in Enríquez del Castillo's passage warrants a closer look at responses to the vulgar, as there may be other ways in which elites throughout Europe discussed and responded to pressure from below.Indeed, if historians working on other periods have emphasised the multiplicity of 'publics' and their contingent nature, we need to ask how we should understand this multiplicity in Castile, and whether what we are really discussing is something belonging to the masses, or something much more contested. 11o address these issues, this article examines the major narrative sources of the fifteenth century, in particular the chronicles of Enríquez del Castillo and Alfonso de Palencia, for their attitudes towards the public, but also situates them within their wider literary context.The fifteenth century saw a lively culture of literary exchange, with writers like Alfonso de Palencia, Iñigo de Mendoza and Pedro López de Ayala turning their hand to political poetry alongside their prose works. 12These writers shared a court culture, held important government posts and enjoyed the patronage of kings and eminent noblemen, and thus their works present an opportunity to examine the ways in which elites, meaning those who expected to dominate institutional and discursive power, attempted to use different languages and forms to respond to and manipulate what they saw as the 'public'.In order to investigate the attitudes revealed by these various sources, this article begins with a summary of the conditions that are identified in the historiography as evidence of non-elite or 'public' agency in Castilian politics.It then analyses the multiple attitudes exhibited by a variety of elites when it comes to the broadening of political commentary.These perspectives open up larger questions for the understanding of the public in medieval politics, both in terms of its impact across society and in terms of the course of its development.

Political Communication and Popular Politics
Thanks to the work of social and political historians of late medieval Europe in recent decades, a consensus has emerged about the growth of non-elite forms of communication and influence in politics.It will be helpful to outline the main aspects of this consensus, including the meaning of 'the people', before we can understand how elites conceptualised and responded to these developments.
Writers of fifteenth-century sources could be referring to many different kinds of socio-political groups when they invoked 'the people'.Occasionally they meant to suggest that the entirety or majority of the kingdom's population felt, spoke or acted in a certain way; at other times they might have meant to refer to a smaller subsection of the kingdom, such as the populace of a particular city.Sometimes what was 'public' was more restricted still, referring only to those with the institutional authority to act as a representative.The most straightforward example of this is the Cortes, which provided 'popular consensus', though the Third Estate did not correspond to the whole of society apart from nobles and clergy, but rather to a limited group of notables, including merchants and elites from urban society. 13It is important to bear in mind this fluidity in the language of 'the people', and how it reflected the dramatic changes in the socio-economic tapestry of Castile in the fifteenth century, with expansions in commercial activity and population growth blurring the boundaries between social categories. 14any historians now agree that late medieval Europe saw a host of societal, institutional and cultural conditions which combined to produce what John Watts has described as 'the pressure of the public on later medieval politics'.These conditions were not necessarily new, but their traces become more frequent in the sources towards the end of the Middle Ages, as speech and action by previously marginal groups became 'a recurring and recognised feature of the political scene'. 15The most important factors in this were primarily of two kinds: channels of political communication and increasingly assertive 'popular politics', or popular agency.Historians of 'political communication' agree that there were efficient links of communication in late medieval society, with taverns, streets, squares and markets acting as focal points of information exchange, in both written and oral forms. 16Some are particularly insistent that popular opinion cannot be considered a by-product of elite discourses, with Liddy and Haemers challenging the claim of others that political arguments were generally produced by authorities and adopted from below, but all agree that society contained numerous interacting currents of discourse of varying tones, from rumour and news through to hostile gossip and outright criticism. 17These kinds of communication, far from being 'idle', had serious political and judicial weight: for example, it was frequently recorded in early-sixteenth-century court cases that something was in the 'public voice and fame in this village', suggesting that news had spread universally within a limited community that constituted a 'public'. 18This followed a long-established legal formula, with fama being used to denote common knowledge in European legal cases since the twelfth century. 19Networks of political communication thus amounted to a genuine capacity for peasants and townsmen on the fringes of political society to learn about and comment on local and national politics, with evidence building from the second half of the century.Historians of Castile, led by Hipólito Rafaél Oliva Herrer, have shown how this operated on the peninsula: for example, in 1516 the villagers of Támara spoke about Carlos V, saying 'he looks like a stupid child' and 'he is not prepared to govern, but to be governed by nobles'. 20his capacity to exchange information and rumours contributed to the growth of a number of particularly important ideas and institutions.The first of these is the increase in anti-noble sentiment: a discursive link was formed between noblemen and violent occupation of the realengo (royal estate) or royal incomes, and there was a general sense that the nobility were entirely unrestrained. 21These discourses were intrinsically connected with ideas of rights, justice, the rejection of servitude, loyalty to the crown and especially the common profit (bien público or cosa pública). 22The result was a pre-packaged justification for complaint.For example, in the mid-fifteenth century the commons of Ciudad Rodrigo, a small fortified city near the Portuguese border, complained about the abuses of municipal officials: they commit crimes 'against the common and public good'. 23These shared grievances and justifications contributed to the solidification of identities and labels for those expressing them. 24The común (commons) defined itself in opposition to the urban nobility, often organised into distinct bands or family groups. 25The term, often associated with the idea of the comunidad (community), shared a semantic field with other words like pueblo (people) and pecheros (taxpayers), identifying those who lacked noble status and therefore owed taxes.These terms were loose enough to allow the commons to be composed of a very diverse group of people, from peasants to non-noble town elites.Of course, none of these concepts were entirely new developments in the fifteenth century, but there was nonetheless a clear growth in the confidence in the legitimacy of the term, so that, by 1483, it was possible for común representatives in Alcalá de Henares to argue that the regimiento (town government) was appointed by and for all the estates: 'since in ancient times the regimiento and the officials of the said city were named and constituted by all the estates'. 26hese common modes of communication, grievances and identities were deployed in an attempt to achieve political agency. 27There were three main sites of this conflict: petitions, town councils, and collective action (of varying legitimacy).The fifteenth century is notable for the increasing frequency with which certain individuals were able to petition higher powers in the name of this newly defined collective.Though there are difficulties relating to the survival of sources, it is clear that in towns like Segovia the self-confidence with which demands were made grew throughout the century, so that as many as thirty petitions which reached the royal council have survived for this one place.They asked for precious documents to be confirmed and complained that their grievances ought to be dealt with immediately by the local government, while also asserting rights over council goods and properties. 28Groups claiming to represent the comunidad while appealing to higher authorities also pursued influence in the town councils (concejos).Following significant pressure, común factions in cities might achieve the right to appoint a small proportion of officials, or have to settle for sending a representative to the meetings of the concejo.When measures to gain representation in the concejo were unsuccessful, non-noble groups sometimes took assembly into their own hands: in Segovia in 1398, for example, the pecheros met in the church of San Bartolomé in order to elect an official who would defend their interests. 29he town councils emerged as a particularly fertile site of común agency in the second half of the fifteenth century, following the dislocations caused by political strife and civil war under Enrique IV and the attempt to restore order by the Catholic Monarchs, Isabella (r.1474-1504) and Fernando V (r.1475-1504).One of the results of these crises was that initiative was taken in various localities to restore order through judicial procedures that explicitly rejected noble influence.The junta general of the ciudades hermandades gathered in 1466 and declared that it opposed injustice and would stand for the common good and security of the realm.It was composed at this stage of cities that supported Enrique IV, like Zamora, Salamanca and León, with Burgos, Valladolid, Toledo and Seville absent (though certain cities that had declared for rebel cause, like Palencia and Avila, also sent representatives). 30Oliva Herrer rejects the argument that the creation of the hermandades was the moment at which the cities joined the civil war: in fact, they represented a much broader and more fluid alliance in the name of the comunidad, which cut across and subverted traditional structures and vertical alignments. 31In 1473, a new hermandad was created, on the impetus of the king himself, and it was now dependent on the monarchy.The alliance of different cities and different social groupings within the urban milieu was thus an important way of achieving agency through the use of communal language, though in reality the social origins of those claiming this agency were often far from plebeian.
Meanwhile, popular politics also manifested itself in less sanctioned ways, again provoked by political crisis.During the civil war under Enrique IV, revolts became increasingly frequent in a number of cities after the death of the rebel figurehead Infante Alfonso, most notably Segovia, Valladolid and Burgos. 32A particularly famous example of this kind of collective action by the lowest members of society occurred slightly later in the Andalusian town of Fuenteovejuna, in September 1476.In a moment that the Golden Age dramatist Lope de Vega was later to immortalise, the 28 Solórzano and Haemers, 'Los grupos populares', 47. 29 Sánchez, 'Changing Patterns of Urban Conflict', 225-6. 30Oliva Herrer, 'Viva el rey', 337. 31Oliva Herrer, 'Viva el rey', 345. 32María Isabel del Val Valdivieso, 'Oligarquía "versus" Comùn (Consecuencias sociopolíticas del triunfo del regimiento en las ciudades castellanas', Medievalismo 4 (1994):41-58 (53).
town's local officials, supported by a mob of citizens, both men and women, seized and murdered the commander (comendador) of the military Order of Calatrava, Fernán Gómez de Guzmán, crying 'long live the monarchs don Fernando and doña Isabel, and death to the traitors and bad Christians!' According to the chronicler Francisco de Rades y Andrada, when royal commissioners attempted to find the culprits, their tortures could not extract any other name than 'Fuenteovejuna'; and when they asked who this was, they were told 'all of the citizens of this town'. 33This phenomenon of violent action by a diverse coalition united by a shared responsibility was to be taken to a new extreme in the first quarter of the next century. 34During the so-called 'War of the Communities' (Guerra de las Comunidades) in 1520-1521, a significant number of urban and rural uprisings took place, drawing on resentment of extraordinary taxation and antinoble sentiment.In places like Dueñas, the rebels elected new officials for government posts while issuing their rallying cry: 'Long live the king and the community!' 35 While the myriad responses provoked by this enormous upheaval lie beyond the scope of this article, the Comuneros revolt of 1520-1 marks the culmination of the emergence of non-elite speech, agency and identity in late medieval Castile.
In summary, therefore, the commons, understood as a heterogeneous group of urban and rural factions united by a sense of shared interest and identified by their non-noble status, demonstrated notable self-confidence in the fifteenth century.Their channels of communication allowed rumour, gossip and news to spread, and this permitted the transmission of slogans, grievances and ideas about the community.At the same time, the upheavals of the civil war and the perception at various times that royal justice was failing to protect this group from the excesses of the nobility provoked petitions, contests for representation in local government and demonstrations, some of which turned violent.All of this combined to create a real sense that groups that had long lain outside of political society, though theoretically represented by it, were able to comment on and manipulate politics themselves.

Elite Responses to the Public Sphere
Denigration By comparison with the care taken to analyse 'communication' or 'popular politics', historians' engagement with the reactions and attitudes of the authors of the very sources they use has been tentative and secondary to another purpose.Where comments are made, it is generally to point out two arguments: that authorities sought to restrain meetings of the comunidad or at least to understand what they discussed, and that rumours deliberately spread in elite texts could be 'a weapon used in the political struggle'. 36his is worth a moment's thought: there is an apparent contradiction between trying 33 Francisco de Rades y Andrada, Crónica de las tres órdenes de Santiago, Calatrava y Alcántara, ed.Derek Lomax (Barcelona: El Albir, 1980), 79- to restrain the 'common voice' and deliberately spreading it, and yet this was very common in the behaviour of governments.The dissonance might be revealing in an account of the development of public discourse in the medieval period.This reminds us of another point to build upon the insights of historians of the public, namely that no individual class has control of discourse or any capacity to eliminate its tensions and contradictions, but some are more powerful producers of it than others.Though it is right for social historians to maintain that the 'popular voice' was not a byproduct of elite discourse but a collection of languages in its own right, it would surely be rash to conclude from this that the view of those elites who already exercised political agency was irrelevant for the formation of the public.Indeed, early modern historians have been much more attuned to the responses of elites to 'public opinion', though they tend to use a stricter definition of the concept which assumes a fuller alignment of a population's opinion that could only be created by print. 37Of course, what was considered 'public opinion' in the early modern world might in reality still be the expression of a limited elite, perhaps now based in Madrid, rather than the population at large, but it is has been shown convincingly that elites recognised the importance of popular discourses and took great pains to know about and censor them. 38This begs the important question of how late medieval Castilian political society responded to a less mature, but nonetheless present, concept of the popular voice.Equally, we ought not to dismiss the possibility that a proper picture of a medieval Castilian 'public sphere' might have to account for a variety of publics operating and competing at a variety of different levels and in a variety of textual and institutional forms.
It is a fact of fundamental importance that much of our evidence for the development of popular discourse and agency comes from sources of elite, and often noble, origin.This is no less true with regard to the main chronicles of the troubles of the midfifteenth century.Diego Enríquez del Castillo was born to a noble family in around 1431, and after studying theology at Salamanca found his way into the service of the future Enrique IV, then prince of Asturias, as a chaplain.When Enrique IV came to the throne in 1454, his chaplain became a trusted royal adviser, carrying out a number of diplomatic missions, and becoming the royal chronicler in 1460. 39Alfonso de Palencia, meanwhile, spent part of his youth in the household of Alfonso de Cartagena, bishop of Burgos, though it is unclear whether he was himself an ecclesiastic. 40He was made chronicler and secretary to the king in September 1456.We are therefore dealing with two highly educated writers deeply connected with royal government at the highest level.
The attitudes and responses of these and other fifteenth-century elites to the political changes outlined above are far from straightforward.On one level, they paint a vivid picture of a fickle, unruly, unpredictable crowd, to be suspected and feared.As early as 37 Fernando J. Bouza Alvarez, Papeles y opinion: Políticas de publicación en el siglo de oro (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, 2008), 35.Michele Olivari argues that it is only possible to speak of popular opinion from the reign of Felipe III (1598-1621): Michele Olivari, Avisos, pesquines y rumores.Los comienzos de opinión pública en la España del siglo XVII (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 2014), 24. 38 Michele Olivari, Entre el trono y la opinión.La vida política en los siglos XVI y XVII (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 2004), 209. 39María del Pilar Rábade Obradó, Diego Enríquez del Castillo, Diccionario Biográfico Electrónico, Real Academía de la Historia, http://dbe.rah.es(accessed April 2020). 40 the Cortes of Palenzuela of 1425, it was complained that members of the commons frequently gathered in councils or covens without the presence of the regidores. 41For Enríquez del Castillo, the pueblo was at times a threatening force who might descend upon and capture the king, even if intending to protect him, as occurred in 1467: 'there was a great scandal among all of the people, saying, "Seize the king!"; arriving in this way with great fury, they surrounded the king entirely'. 42Elsewhere, his description is especially scathing: the ignorant masses, where malice continually resides, are always scandalous; the enemies of peace, who desire novelties, are glad of damages, exalt in evils, and abhor good things. 43fonso de Palencia is similarly biting when it comes to the 'seditious murmurs' of the comunidad. 44He writes, 'many murmured in secret, and no one dared to speak openly.Things deserving of sorrow were ridiculed, while grief, laments and huge clamours … vexed Spain'. 45Elsewhere, in a passage dealing with the neighbouring kingdom of Aragon, Palencia reveals himself more thoughtful than his counterpart about the causes of the popular assertiveness he despises.He describes how the city of Barcelona had achieved prosperity, but 'as exuberant opulence usually engenders pride, which is the head of all evils, the souls of the citizens were smeared'.As a result, they came to hate their king and to call for liberty and democracy. 46Thus, whether in his native Castile or elsewhere on the peninsula, Palencia identified and denigrated popular agency as it arose around him.
Importantly, Palencia also describes the multiple sources of these kinds of rumours in different sections of urban and rural society: he tells of 'religious men' who in 'public sermons and orations before the eyes of their audience assured them that great and terrible punishment would follow from the degradation of customs', while 'shepherds and rude country-folk told of incredible things, and openly protested to the king that they had seen portents of disaster'. 47Like Enríquez del Castillo, he also highlights the coercive force of the pueblo: in the battle of Olmedo in 1445, he notes, there were 'popular troops' who were 'a considerable force in battle'. 48In his dealing with the events at Fuenteovejuna, Palencia makes little attempt to hide his disdain, referring to the rebels as a 'furious multitude' full of 'ferocious peasants', whose skill at hunting had given them 'savage habits'.His depiction of the mob was made more dangerous by his reference to their organisation, condemning the 'wicked sworn conspiracy of those of Fuenteovejuna'.He completes his undermining of the rebel cause by highlighting how the target of their anger, Fernán Gómez de Guzmán, was far from an unjust lord and had even visited the sick, while afterwards the base mob had turned to looting. 49he response by elites, both in Cortes and in their chronicles, to popular speech and agency was thus, on one level, highly critical.This may reflect the expedient defence of their political interests and even fears for their personal security, while for the chroniclers some of this attitude may have been informed by classical warnings about the mob, such as Horace's admonition that an eminent man should not trust the profanum vulgus (profane crowd), which is like a changing monster with a thousand heads. 50Even when inspired by classical tradition, however, the fact remains that the writers' criticism responded to what they saw as real actions taken by real people, rather than a conjured vision of the crowd to add literary effect.All of these warnings and criticisms combine to present the comunidad as a dangerous force in the Castilian polity, who separately or together may know about and discuss affairs of government and sometimes take matters into their own hands, even if they do so ignorantly and maliciously, or because they are puffed up with pride.

Appropriation
However, the attitude of elite writers in fifteenth-century Castile was much more complex than this straightforward dismissal would suggest.The realisation that there existed rumours and threats from the margins of political society may have increased anxiety among writers like our chroniclers, but this very anxiety also led to a response that has gone entirely unnoticed by historians of the public.In fact, writers tacitly acknowledged legitimacy in the voice of the comunidad and incorporated it as part of their attempt to exert control using language.They did this in two distinct ways: they adopted the voice that we have seen them criticise, and appealed directly to it.We can see them doing this across a variety of literary forms, since the chroniclers were part of a literate culture in which writers expected to move freely between historiographical work, translation projects and other pursuits, like composing poetry or treatises.The famous fourteenth-century chronicler Pedro López de Ayala, for example, wrote the long poem Rimado de Palacio between 1379 and 1403, while Alfonso de Palencia was the author of tracts like the Batalla campal de los perros contra los lobos (c.1457).To this corpus should be added, on the basis of thematic similarity and comparable status of their authors, the anonymous Coplas de la Panadera (mid-fifteenth century) and Coplas de Mingo Revulgo (c.1465-7), which has been persuasively attributed to Iñigo de Mendoza. 51Historians have been hesitant to consider these works together, perhaps owing to difficulties in attributing authorship with absolute certainty, but it seems clear that they share enough common features and emerged in close enough proximity that they were part of some kind of shared literary culture.When they are analysed together and read in the context of the political changes described above, they yield striking fruits in the study of elite attitudes to the 'public sphere'.
The authors use a number of tactics to appropriate the voice of public opinion and turn it to their own purposes.One has been noticed by historians: the willingness to repeat rumours in order to discredit political opponents. 52It certainly appears that 50 Palencia, Gesta, lix.The quotation from Horace comes from Odes 3.1.1. 51Mackay, 'Ritual and Propaganda', 39. 52 See above, n. 36.
this was a deliberate policy: Alfonso de Palencia, for example, readily recorded rumours of illegitimacy of Enrique IV's daughter, Juana, after her birth in 1462: Great rumours stained him [Enrique], and his own dissolute words condemned him … all those who had already heard the public rumour muttered openly, and the clamour grew more and more when the princess was born at Madrid. 53e chronicler goes on to imply that the royal party were covering up the king's impotence, and even that the queen might have turned elsewhere for her child's father.The crucial point is that the chronicler calls these rumours 'just suspicion', and happily uses them to discredit the king. 54Enríquez del Castillo, in his capacity as royal chronicler to Enrique IV, unsurprisingly passes over these rumours in silence, but he too adopts the voice of the people when he sees fit.In Segovia, he reports, 'all of the people consoled him, saying to him in loud voices: "O good king, pious and sincere, who never offends us; curse those who persecute you! O traitorous servants and evil knights, who have destroyed you thus, by becoming so mighty themselves!"' 55 Like Palencia, he leaves no doubt as to his own position on the truth spoken by the people: As the people came to understand the degeneracy of the tyrants, God, the righteous judge, who knows the truth and who wanted to show the king's innocence and the cruelty of his enemies, breathed into the hearts of the good so that they would reject division and turn themselves to the truth. 56 seems clear, then, that the writers were more than willing to present and endorse popular rumours and speeches in their texts, with more than a slight suspicion that they were the authors of the precise words used.They were adopting the voice of the people for themselves, in ways that may have been entirely unintended by the original mouthpieces of the comunidad.
Indeed, Enríquez del Castillo's willingness to invoke divine approval for the opinion of the people and to suggest that God may intervene on their side calls to mind the medieval saying vox populi, vox Dei.This was explicitly endorsed by Alfonso de Palencia, when he once again harnessed popular opinion to undermine the legacy of an enemy.He describes delight at the death of Pedro Girón, master of the order of Calatrava, in 1466: 'The voice of the people, which possesses something of divine testimony, made a great deal of this, and pronounced the passing of such a proud tyrant to be a miracle'. 57An even more emphatic claim was set out by the humanist Fernando del Pulgar: 'the voice of the people is a divine voice'. 58he provenance of this statement is of the utmost interest for our purposes.It comes in his late-fifteenth-century gloss to the Coplas de Mingo Revulgo, which, I contend, should be read as one of the most strident examples of elite writers inhabiting the popular voice.The work, which must have been written at some point between the summer of 1465 and 1467, begins with an appeal to a shepherd, named Mingo 53 Palencia, Gesta, 236. 54Palencia, Gesta, 236. 55Enríquez del Castillo, Crónica, 291. 56Enríquez del Castillo, Crónica, 297. 57Palencia, Gesta, 400. 58Ohara, 'Reflexiones', 251.
Revulgo, to explain why he is so distraught. 59He replies that he has been by disaster, and that it is all the fault of Candaulo, his rabadán (head shepherd).This is a man who passes 'the whole day like a drunkard/ Lounging senselessly,/ Who does not see our perils'. 60Candaulo's negligence, caused in part by his slavering after the shepherd boys, has made the sheep dogs useless and invited seven foul wolves to terrorise the flocks.His discourse ends with powerful imagery: The bloated wolves approach, and with their mouths gaping their faces bring burning and frenzied eyes.Their bodies carry their bellies, sunken and gorged, which they can barely move. 61 commentators have noticed ever since Pulgar's gloss in the 1480s, the complaints of Mingo Revulgo are thinly veiled moral and political allegory.The lame sheep-dogs represent the four cardinal virtues, while the wolves are both the Seven Deadly Sins and a well-known metaphor for overly rapacious noblemen.Slightly more contentious is the identification of Candaulo, but again it seems fairly clear that the failure of the rabadán to protect his flock is analogous to the breakdown of order under Enrique IV's kingshipthis is especially likely given the allegations of homosexuality made by Mingo.As a result, it is reasonable to suggest that the speech of Mingo Revulgo is an invective against the government of Enrique IV, and, indeed, one which draws on some of the common complaints about lawlessness in the countryside that are highlighted by historians of the popular voice.
The key question, then, is what such a criticism hoped to achieve, and why it was presented in this manner.Some doubts remain about the authorship of the poem, but by far the most likely candidate is Fray Iñigo de Mendoza: there are similarities in style and content to his other known work, the Coplas de Vita Christi; that work praises the Coplas de Mingo Revulgo; and the two poems are situated together in a manuscript of the British Library. 62Mendoza was well connected, being part of the party led by Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, marqués of Santillana, Pedro Fernández de Velasco, conde of Haro, and Pedro González de Mendoza, bishop of Calahorra, all of whom were involved in the political crises at the highest level. 63Thus, it seems that we have another writer moving in elite circles, though in this case using poetry to advance the group's message.However, historians have paid too little attention to the precise way in which Iñigo de Mendoza went about this.The act of putting criticisms of the king into the voice of a shepherd is patently part of the same tactic as the chroniclers' adoption of the voice of the pueblo in their narratives.Not only did Pulgar acknowledge the divine truth of the popular voice in his gloss, but the very name of the shepherd might refer to the Latin vulgus and the Castilian vulgar, meaning 'of the people'.Even more significantly, the vocabulary chosen by the poet is of a colloquial and idiomatic style that 59 Las Coplas de Mingo Revulgo, ed.Devid Paolini (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2015), 38-9. 60Las Coplas de Mingo Revulgo, ed.Paolini, 177. 61Las Coplas de Mingo Revulgo, ed.Paolini, 190. 62 MacKay, 'Ritual and Propaganda', 31-2; Las Coplas de Mingo Revulgo, ed.Paolini, 75-6. 63MacKay, 'Ritual and Propaganda', 40.
bears resemblance to a dialect called sayagués, spoken near Salamanca.As Paolini suggests, the language reads less like the work of native speaker of the dialect than a barely concealed effort to put words into the vernacular of pastoral society. 64Pulgar saw this entirely: in a letter accompanying his glossed version, presented to Pedro Fernández de Velasco, he wrote, 'in this bucolic, or rustic and pastoral song, he [the poet] wanted to share understanding of the doctrine which, they say, is the essence of rusticity'. 65With the agency of popular groups becoming ever more apparent and the lively culture of rumour and popular opinion in full swing, elite writers thus responded by clothing their own criticisms in that same idiom.
This suggestion is upheld when other texts are taken into consideration.One of our chroniclers, Alfonso de Palencia, wrote a more cryptic allegory entitled La batalla campal de los perros contra los lobos ('The pitched battle between the dogs and the wolves').This, in the form of a prose treatise rather than a poem, adopts the same metaphors as the Mingo Revulgo, with the wolves threatening the flocks, who are inadequately defended by the dogs.The theme of lawlessness is again highlighted, with the pastoral setting once again used to lay the blame squarely at the feet of the noblemen and governors who ought to protect the peace.Significantly, Alfonso de Palencia first composed the Batalla in Latin shortly before 1457, but this has been lost, and what survives is his own vernacular translation, composed in 1490. 66This raises three important points.First, the original work, placing high political concerns in the setting of the countryside, was clearly intended for a restricted, educated audience.Second, one of the considerations behind the composition of the pastoral work was undoubtedly the imitation of classical examples like Virgil's Eclogues.Third, Alfonso de Palencia later decided, perhaps with encouragement, that a vernacular translation would help the poem circulate more widely for the education of the nobility. 67Certainly, the awareness of classical pastoral work is also a factor with Mingo Revulgo, or at least in the way that the humanist Pulgar read the poem, as can be inferred from his describing it as a 'bucolic'. 68Indeed, other famous works might be better described as inspired by pastoral literature than as responses to the public sphere, such as Iñigo López de Mendoza's poems about encounters with delightful shepherdesses, although part of the appeal of the bucolic format may have been that it was a way of addressing popular concerns. 69Certainly, Alfonso de Palencia's decision to translate the work means that we ought to consider it as something more than a work of classical imitatio.Perhaps having seen the success of the Coplas de Mingo Revulgo, which was circulated widely in print, Palencia chose to bring his work to a more extensive, or more public, audience.
However, whatever his motives, by writing in this way Palencia contributed to the emerging fashion of placing criticism of the realm's political elites in the aesthetic surroundings of the pastoral, reinforcing the association between the vulgar and the capacity to reveal political truth.Indeed, in his Gesta, he affirmed this connection: he specifically mentions 'shepherds and rude country folk' as chief purveyors of rumour, demonstrating that the adoption of the voice of the lowest stratum of the public was not simply nod to the pastoral genre. 70This form of criticism was certainly a 'departure' from previous practice, as Stern has noted: one need only contrast these vulgar complaints with López de Ayala's late-fourteenth-century masterpiece, which critiques the court not through the eyes of a shepherd, but in the voice of a dissatisfied knight from Toledo. 71ndeed, still others contributed to this emerging tradition, adding weight to the suggestion that elite authors began to adopt the public voice in a new way in the fifteenth century.There were exceptions, such as the Coplas del Provincal, whose criticisms of church and state are spoken by a high-ranking ecclesiastical official, but as the century wore on this became unusual. 72More typical was Alfonso de Palencia's Tratado de la perfeçion del triunfo militar, in which strongly subversive questions are asked of the nobility by a rustic villager: 'what is the honest work suffered by our noblemen?' 73This case is made more complex by the fact that this arcadian critic turns out to have been an educated townsman in disguise.Far from undermining the argument about appropriation, this character thus embodies it: the townsman demonstrates the strategy adopted in all these works, where elites take on the appearance and voice of peasants to speak simple truths more effectively.There are also examples from other kingdoms.In 1522, John Skelton created a popular character called Collyn Clout to voice his criticisms of Cardinal Wolsey, though Collyn is distinctive in being reluctant to endorse the common complaints he reports. 74The anonymous fifteenth-century English poem Mum and the Sothsegger is also interesting for its placing some of its most perceptive truths in the mouth of a bee-keeper, though it is also notable that it also finds wisdom in writing -'Now for[to] conseille þe king vnknytte I a bagge/ Where many a pryue poyse is preyntid'whereas Castilian poems do not generally consider books as a source of political truth. 75ne further Castilian text deserves closer scrutiny: the anonymous Coplas de la Panadera.These clearly have an elite origin and focus, since their purpose is to accuse knights on both sides of the Battle of Olmedo, 1445, of cowardice.Once again, the way they achieve this deserves attention.The poem opens with a similar call to that directed at Mingo Revulgo, this time addressed to a female baker: Baker, camp-follower, who sells cheap bread, tell us something alarming which happened to you on the road.Speak, baker! 76ith a sharp and loquacious tongue and the heart of a coward, the commander Manrique chose a swift horse and a great retreat, fleeing at an inopportune time; in one hour, he put six leagues between him and the fight. 77e poet's choice of a female bread-maker is particularly resonant: not only was the female voice thought to delight more than usual in rumour, but, as del Val has shown, men and women interacted in the production of bread in a way that was acknowledged to allow news and gossip to spread. 78Thus, to put such scathing criticism in the voice of a panadera is to adopt the most authentic popular parlance, and is a clear example of the willingness of elite writers to respond to the emergence of a public opinion by appropriating its voice.The attitude of elites to the public was far from a straightforward rejection of its legitimacy: they also inhabited that public's voice, reporting its gossip, giving words to its rumours and creating pastoral characters that would speak acerbic criticisms of the most eminent in the realm.

Direct Appeal
Appropriating the voice of the non-elite commentators was not the only strategy available to political writers in the fifteenth century.Alongside attempts to adopt the public voice, there is also evidence of an increasing willingness to appeal directly to various elements of that public.Historians have been alert to this only at certain times: the specific forms of propaganda used by Isabella, for instance, have been particularly eyecatching. 79What our texts reveal, however, is a much broader change of strategy as elite discussion reorientated itself towards a new imagined audience.
The notion of addressing a 'public', understood as a broad and even universal description, was not new, and even in the mid-thirteenth century Alfonso X's Fuero Real described the work of scribes as 'public and communal for all'. 80Nevertheless, it is clear that 'all' was used figuratively, with only a smaller literate group making use of public documents.Later, in the fourteenth century, there are glimpses what people understood by 'publishing', but again this had a limited scope.For example, in the dedication of his 1386 translation of Livy's Decades to Juan I, López de Ayala wrote, I pledge to your royal majesty this book of Titus Livy, which sets out and relates the principles observed by princes and knights in their battles … may it be brought out now in public, so that the princes and knights who hear it might find good example, experience and strength from it. 81he dedication reveals that, in the 1380s, López de Ayala's concept of presenting something 'in public' was distributing it widely among noblemen, for instruction in pursuits that were their domain.By contrast to earlier views of the public as something reserved for noblemen or at most those who had need of legal documentation, by the late fifteenth century the concept had broadened notably.Alfonso de Palencia's chronicle, for example, is full of references to 'public sermons and speeches', 'public rejoicing' and 'public rumour'. 82Even more revealingly, when he describes the spread of the news of a noble plot he says, 'likewise when the affair was public all the crowd applauded'. 83In the fifteenth century, then, the behaviour and writing of elites show that doing something in public could also refer to different spaces and audiences, as well as the continued legal maxim that one could not claim ignorance of public pronouncements.Notions of what was public thus broadened significantly at the very time when a wider section of society was trying to make their voice heard, and this informed the strategies adopted by political agents.It was in this context that, at certain times, elites responded to the public by refiguring the way in which they addressed political society, appealing to a broader public than they had acknowledged in the past.
Our narrative and poetic texts reveal all kinds of appeals to the public, some of which were more disguised than Palencia's public sermons and speeches.The Coplas de Mingo Revulgo, for example, are more complex than the straightforward presentation of complaint in the voice of a downtrodden shepherd.Following Mingo's speech, Gil Arribato, a prophetic shepherd, responds to him uncompromisingly: If you were wise and understood the truth, you would see that you have had a bad shepherd because of your own malice.Take from your heart the evil of which it is full and you will see that he will be punished or God will provide another good one. 84t only is this another case of a phenomenon we saw earlier, namely the utterance of political messages in a pastoral voice, but it also includes an appeal to the aggrieved community: address your own sins, and the disorder plaguing the people will come to an end.However, this is not merely a repetition of the commonplace view, drawn from the Bible or John of Salisbury's Policraticus, that bad governance was a 82 Palencia, Gesta, 181, 236, 308. 83 punishment for sin. 85MacKay has brilliantly suggested that these lines embody a particular position taken by some in the crisis of 1465, whereby Enrique IV's shortcomings were attacked, but it was considered that he should only replaced by Infante Alfonso if all other attempts to resolve the disorders failed. 86The counter-arguments to this hypothesis, such as that otro bueno (another good) is masculine for the sake of the rhyme scheme or that it is intended as an impersonal good, are not entirely satisfactory, since both este and bueno clearly function in apposition to mal pastor (bad shepherd), whom everyone agrees to be Enrique IV. 87 Moreover, it is difficult to deny the close connection between this message, that the community should correct its own ills and hope for a new king only as a last resort, and to the speech made by the bishop of Calahorra in 1465, in which he argued that 'if the head [of the kingdom], because of some inability is sick, it would seem better counsel to apply those medicines which reason suggests rather than to remove the head'. 88Building on MacKay's insights, we can therefore see not only that the Coplas were part of the Mendoza party's desire to acknowledge Enrique's faults without supporting the rebellion, but that this particular interest group used a variety of forms to adopt and appeal to the public voice, in which it was willing to acknowledge a certain degree of legitimacy.
This very same dynamic is also visible in the chronicle sources.This is not to invoke the trope, sometimes adopted a little too casually in the historiography, which states that chronicles were always 'propaganda' tools to influence their readers.Although it might be significant that both Diego Enríquez del Castillo and Alfonso de Palencia at one time held the official post of royal chronicler, and hence had a clear brief to influence and construct memory, there is more direct proof in the texts of a broader kind of appeal taking place. 89We have already seen how Enríquez del Castillo describes the marqués of Villena as astuto (cunning) for his willingness to converse with the people, and noted that the chronicler allows such actions appear seditious and threatening. 90Elsewhere, however, the very same behaviour is praised: in Toledo, 1467, Pedro López de Ayala (a descendant of the famous chronicler) 'walked through the city, calming the people, and for the greater tranquillity and contentment of all, ordered the bishop of Badajoz to leave the city within an hour'.He then describes the success of the nobleman's actions: 'with this done, all of the people went to disarm and returned to their homes'. 91It might be tempting to dismiss this as a colourful, but unlikely, literary device, but it remains significant that the chronicler could plausibly depict such a direct appeal to the people of Toledo, even though we may suspect that 'the people' stands here for a smaller, representative group rather than the whole populace.
Moreover, Enríquez del Castillo even includes first-hand evidence of this kind of behaviour, in which he himself appeals to a segment of the public.The occasion for this remarkable exchange was 1466, when the Hermandad had been created, with representatives of cities, towns and villages gathering at Tordesillas. 92In response, the king ordered Enríquez del Castillo to write a letter exhorting them to create a company, supported by natural law, with the final power to give force to justice.The full letter is included the chronicle, and in it the author theorises about the common good and the necessity for the pueblo to defend their king and homeland. 93he following year, he again addressed components of the Hermandad after they obstructed the march of the king and his family to Béjar.This time, he includes a flattering description of the response to his own rhetoric: 'having heard this, everyone was most happy and entirely in agreement with it'. 94All of this evidence comes together to suggest that elite writers used different forms of text and textual strategies to appeal to the public, or at least certain elements of it.This is by no means to assert that texts, writers and politicians had never sought 'public' audiences in the past, but instead to argue that the understanding of the concept of the 'public' had changed, and with it political discourse adopted new modes of expression.Public opinion had become important enough for elite writers and politicians to address and appeal to that public directly, even within the same texts as they denigrated and appropriated its voice.
On closer inspection of Enríquez del Castillo's letters to the Hermandad, however, there are signs of other factors at play.In particular, his forms of address are striking: he appeals repeatedly to the representatives of the Hermandad as 'senators' (padres conscriptos), in what is undoubtedly an indicator that he wrote with classical rhetoric as his guide. 95Indeed, his entire chronicle is laden with rhetorical turns of phrase, such as this in praise of the comunidad: 'O blessed people, countrymen worthy of glory, nation worthy of renown!' 96 Enríquez del Castillo was not alone: López de Ayala was an assiduous translator of classical texts while Alfonso de Palencia was similarly steeped in Renaissance culture, spending time in Rome, translating Plutarch and structuring his Gesta according to the format of Livy's Decades. 97It might thus be objected that the rhetorical exhortations to the people in these works are not indicative of any real attitude to the public in fifteenth-century Castile, and instead reflect elite writers' enthusiasm for imitating classical authors; indeed, this is how they have been explained in the past. 98 similar objection could be raised about Alfonso de Palencia's choice to write in Latin: it might seem odd, given what has been said about adopting and addressing the common voice, for the language to be one that the majority of that public did not understand.However, Palencia explains elsewhere that it is a question of clarity: he has taken 'all of those things from vulgar darkness, distilling them to the light of Latinity'.99 It is more likely that Latin was chosen owing to its closer connection with the classical virtue of clear and persuasive speech, as taught in the ars rhetorica, though it does caution us once again against getting carried away with the idea that the chronicle was a tool for nation-wide propaganda in this period.More importantly, it seems that the training in classical rhetoric was not imbibed by Castilian writers without any ideological 92 Enríquez del Castillo, Crónica, 27. 93 Enríquez del Castillo, Crónica, 260-3.94 Enríquez del Castillo, Crónica, 268.95 Enríquez del Castillo, Crónica, 262.96 Enríquez del Castillo, Crónica, 304.97 Palencia, Gesta, liii.98 Palencia, Gesta, lxiv.99 Alfonso de Palencia, Crónica de Enrique IV, ed. and trans.Antonio Paz y Melia (Madrid: Atlas, 1973), xl.components accompanying it. Fo example, where Enríquez del Castillo draws attention to his source, he does so to illustrate his point about the role of the entire pueblo in defending the res publica: 'Approving of this, [Marcus] Tullius Cicero says in his book of the Duties [De officiis], "What greater benefit could come anyone, than being born to defend and help his fellow men?"' 100 This reveals that, for a Castilian writer in the fifteenth century to follow the life of the classical man of letters, he had to understand how to use deliberative rhetoric to persuade his audience to follow virtue, and this meant digesting ideas about the common good and the role of the communitas in the res publica.This, coming at the very moment when these ideas were being deployed with greater selfconfidence in Castilian cities, can hardly have failed to contribute to the growing sense that the public mattered, and to have encouraged writers to respond in the conflicting ways that we have seen.101

Conclusions
In sum, writers and politicians in the fifteenth century noticed the importance of the public in the political life of Castile and responded in ways that appear conflicted: they worried about it, criticised it and denigrated it, but within the very same texts they also adopted its voice, or appealed directly to certain elements of public opinion.They did so in part as a response to the real political conditions of the fifteenth century that have been discussed at length by historians, and also under the influence of the fashion for the pastoral and humanist ideas about rhetoric and civic participation.The remaining question, therefore, is what this means for the idea of the 'public sphere'.On one level, it could be argued that this illustrates a particular stage in the development of the public: once a certain amount of pressure is felt 'from below', it provokes a response, with various attempts by those who already occupy the modes of political expression to use languages to reinforce their dominance.Interestingly, as Olivari has suggested, in later centuries elites tried harder to ascertain what people were saying, whereas in our period the same figures were more interested in using the voice for themselves. 102This is fundamental to a full understanding of the contested nature of the public, which we cannot appreciate unless we acknowledge that the public grew up in the gaze, and even to some extent on the tongues, of the elite.
In turn, however, this may well have contributed to the self-confidence of those they sought to keep on the margins of political advocacy.If there is a suspicion that imitating the public voice gave it a kind of implied legitimacy, there is certainly a case to be made that the decision to address the pueblo directly could have provided opportunities for ambitious elements of the común to step into a role of mediating between these elite messages and the community.There are signs of a connection between the rhetorical appeals identified here in texts for elite audiences and changes underway in representative politics.In 1475, for example, the Catholic Monarchs accepted that crisis had necessitated the involvement of the común in local affairs: local officials 'had to give position to the community … so that matters might be carried out for good governance, 100 Enríquez del Castillo, Crónica, 304. 101Luchía, 'La noción de "bien común"', 319-20; Lawrance, 'Spanish Vernacular Humanism', 73. 102Olivari, Entre el trono, 210.
article points to a more dialectical process, and calls for a history that integrates discursive change across society, not just at the bottom.Politics in fact became more 'public', not in Habermas' sense of a 'sphere' for unrestrained criticism, but in the sense that previously marginalised groups used networks to share slogans, grievances and ideas about the community and sought influence via petitions, local government and public demonstrations.In response, political agents began to recognise, worry about, appropriate and address multiple publics more than they had in the past, and in new ways.In chronicles, allegorical poems, treatises, glosses, letters and government documents, different types of elites, who had in common institutional positions which afforded them access to the recognised channels of political discourse, attacked the ignorant masses, borrowed their criticisms and characterised (even caricatured) their members for their own purposes, or spoke to a much broader audience than would have occurred to politicians even a century earlier.As they did so, they influenced the character and construction of those publics: they contributed to the self-confidence with which certain arguments were deployed, but they also ensured that the comunidad of Castile could not claim sole use of their own 'public voice' without a fight.