This study has proceeded from the top down: from the king, his closest ministers, and the Cortes; to large municipal and seigneurial jurisdictions; to towns and villages; and, finally, to the common people of Castile. It might appear that such a route would be one of diminishing power and resources. But the top-down model is not quite accurate, as the experience of Toribio de Cifuentes shows: Cifuentes lived in Getafe, outside Madrid, where he was a member of the militia. In 1641 he wrote to the Council of War to tell the ministers of his many illnesses, including a bad (or missing) right arm. His father was a widower and very old, and he needed his son's help. Therefore, Cifuentes said, he could not possibly serve as a soldier, and he begged the council to intercede. The council did so. After it had confirmed with the district sergeant major that Cifuentes' story was true, it advised the king to grant his request.

Toribio de Cifuentes had a direct relationship to his king. He was not rendered impotent by the many jurisdictional layers between himself and Philip IV. On the contrary; he used them. The men who devised military recruitment policy for the king, cognizant of the potential stirrings by men such as Cifuentes, must have been conditioned by that knowledge. It would be a mistake to exaggerate common people's recourses for responding to the military and fiscal demands of the mid-seventeenth century. But, as individuals and as communities, they were not silent. People's daily lives were transformed by the mid-seventeenth-century crisis.