Could a Peasant Defeat a Knight in Battle?

The Rawlsian veil of ignorance[1] that the modern American left is pretty much based on is largely an extension of Locke.

Sure, there are some economic ideas that the early liberals had that most modern liberals (and modern conservatives for that matter) would eschew, but to reduce their thinking to being purely libertarian does a disservice to the modern left, which needs all the historical support it can muster.

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance

We actually had a drill called the "villains blow"[0] designed to deal with an untrained assailant attempting an overly strong top down blow. The basic story is that a peasant (villain basically means "poor" back in the day) has gotten their hands on a sword and would like to express their displeasure about how their life is going on you. It's scary how effective the drill is, during slow speed training you have to actually fight to slow the weapon down. At speed it'll end an engagement with one blow; someone chopped in the neck tends to stop fighting very quickly. In a sword fight between a trained person and an untrained person, the trained combatant will win convincingly the vast majority of the time.

Beyond that there were fairly complex drills about fighting multiple opponents when unarmored, which we never practiced because it's a logistical nightmare. It can be done, but it's going to be very hard to pull off; you effectively have to move in a way to make your opponents interfere with each other. Doable, but since unarmored longsword fencing is a very high stakes game, chances are even if it works you're leaving with an interesting scar and perhaps fewer fingers than you started with.

One manuscript (I forget which) had some section that basically said this "if you find yourself set upon by five or more peasants while in harness (hard plate), stand as you will and cut them down one by one". It is extremely hard to kill someone wearing full plate armor if they're standing and prepared. You either need overwhelming numbers, specialized weapons designed to defeat hard armor, or they need to be knocked down onto the ground first (there's a reason "he fell" was a euphemism for death in combat). Ideally (if you're not the knight), you'd like to see all three. This is what happened in Agincourt, where freaked out English archers (who wouldn't be ransomed if they lost) swarmed and drowned the exhausted French knights in the mud while beating them to death with hammers for good measure.

As an aside, the difficulty of getting up in armor is vastly overstated[1]. Yes, plate armor is heavy, but any armor that you can't move in is a death trap, plus the vast majority of this stuff was worn by men who would be in fantastic shape, since fighting was their only job. The problem with plate armor isn't that it's impossible to get up in, the problem with plate armor is that it's impossible to get up when you're being opposed. Think less "I can't get up" and more "I can't get up with another guy on top of me trying to kill me". Plus while armor is heavy (50-60lbs isn't unusual), it's not that heavy; for comparison a typical Marine might carry 100-200lbs into Afghanistan.

[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yTH0ADnBZg

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzTwBQniLSc

NA had two minorities with opposite enough ideologies that they got violent. The UK would have never succeeded in keeping the peace there were it not for having a good chunk of the population on "their side". The violence eventually came to mostly an end because the IRA blew up enough crap that the British were willing to mostly throw them a bone in the Good Friday agreement and everyone was sick enough of the fighting to reach an agreement. The agreement was satisfactory enough for enough people that most combatants laid down their arms. An agreement so favorable (i.e. favorable enough to get them to stop fighting) to the republican faction(s) would never have been reached without the violence spilling over into England to a greater extent in the 1980s and making people ask tough questions like "why does what they do even matter to us?". You can call that a "loss" or a "win" or a "pivot to drug trafficking" or whatever you want to make it compatible with your politics. The framing doesn't really change what happened. Considering your characterization of North Ireland I don't expect you to frame the issue in a neutral way.

Consider how the troubles might have played out without loyalist factions. Starts looking a lot like some other, nastier, more resource sucking conflicts. Local support is required any time you want to make a bunch of people do stuff you don't want them to.