71–80 of 326 posts
A few ideas for how peasants can defeat a knight: 1) Use disguises to approach in circumstances where a knight is vulnerable 2) Surprise arson in the middle of the night 3) Pit trap 4) Deadfall trap With outside resources from wealthy parties interested in influencing the land in which the peasants live, a guerilla war can be sustained for several years.
Mindset would likely have played a big part, and battle then vs battle now were very different things. A peasant could absolutely kill a knight but probably not in battle, and the opportunity to do so would be unlikely to arise because the knight would probably not be in a position to be ambushed. For most peasantry the very thought of going after a knight would also be almost unimaginable. Seems like a not-unreasona…
Wouldn't a more apt comparison be someone armed with a 9mm pistol trying to take on a trained soldier with advanced anti-ballstic armor and plating, and an accurate rifle?
The only thing that would hamper modern soldiers is that from everything I have read medieval knights weren't possessed with any qualms about killing; life in general was much more violent than we experience now.
For more reading about this mindset, acoup.blog [0] has an excellent review of Bertrand de Born's work. What struck me is just how casual violence is treated, and that war is a treated as the expected normal condition. The peasantry definitely did not hold these views, but given that the nobility had a vast armament advantage and copious experience in killing I doubt many modern soldiers would be quite so callous. The only modern exception I can think of is child soldiers; but they have been subjected to abuse specifically to train them to be able to commit horrific acts. Maybe I am wrong, but I don't think most soldiers in modern militaries would easily be able to slaughter their countrymen with quite the same abandon. This is speculation, but I suspect that the nobles were able to do this because they viewed the peasantry as semi-subhuman; see the American antebellum south for the types of atrocities that that mindset enables.
[0] https://acoup.blog/2020/04/16/collections-a-trip-through-ber...
It’s not just weaponry, most of fighting is nutrition, I’m surprised the article doesn’t discuss that. Given that the article says the knights and their weaponry were correlated to wealth and power, I would expect the knights to be better fed than the peasants as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a solid analogy, because medieval armor was very effective against the weapons of the time[1]. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2z7t3k/plate...
Yet at Morgarten the Swiss massacred a Habsburg force. Armoured knights need an open battlefield to be effective, in crowded terrain a force made up of peasant fighters equipped with polearms is clearly superior.
Even in the Napoleonic wars the best defence against cavalry was the square with soldiers using bayonets on their muskets.
In the Annals of St Bertin there's mention of an attack by the Danes (Vikings) on a region of Francia in 859 AD, where the peasants formed an association to defend themselves and fought off the Vikings, and drove them off without the assistance of the Carolingian rulers. This is reported by the Carolingians as brave but immoral, because Charlemagne had banned any such associations or militias, and military service wa…
That varied by region.
Often English Lords were required to provide troops or arrows on demand, and those both came from the peasant class.
(Frankly, peasant men would have to be tough to work in the fields in the mid-day sun, so were ideal stock for battles.)
Otherwise what was the point in appointing nobility if they weren't contributing an army, but just collecting taxes?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Working the field all day is going to make someone tough and lean. If it’s a particular lazy knight that enjoys too much food, well. Would be an interesting overlap of nutrition vs fitness vs indulgence.
Nutrition in childhood, especially early childhood, is extremely critical to development. The average person historically was remarkably short, generally because of childhood malnourishment. Simply being properly nourished in childhood would have led to a huge height and weight advantage (also probably considerable advantages in brain development). Even into the 18th century the average height of an officer in the Br…
I found this interesting article while looking:
Heights across the Last 2,000 Years in England: https://oro.open.ac.uk/53774/3/53774.pdf
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of the English soldiers who killed knights at Agincourt were longbowmen shooting from a distance and protected by both terrain and a line of sharpened stakes that prevented the French cavalry from charging them. That is not the kind of direct confrontation that the article is talking about.
Your comment regarding the archers reminded me of "The Grail Quest" book series by Bernard Cornwell
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> lazy knight That might be possible , but is it likely? A knight is basically a medieval super-soldier: an individual with a huge amount of ongoing personal+state investment going into their ability to project power on the field. Even if they're also a feudal lord who lives within their own holdings (and therefore someone who's not beholden to anyone around them, only to a distant king) everyone working for them is…
Nope, there were a lot of fat and/or incompetent knights. I assure you.
More interesting questions are:
Was the average knight fat?
How common were the?
How effective were fat/incompetent knights on the battlefield?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't a more apt comparison be someone armed with a 9mm pistol trying to take on a trained soldier with advanced anti-ballstic armor and plating, and an accurate rifle?
No, the comparison to an APC (armored personnel carrier) is apt- knights were armored enough to be nearly invulnerable to the weaponry a peasant would have access to. To compare to something modern, I'm sure enough street protestors would be able to disable an APC and kill the soldiers inside at least some of the time, but the soldiers in the APC could likely win the 40:9000 battle cited in the article. Remember that…
Mindset would likely have played a big part, and battle then vs battle now were very different things. A peasant could absolutely kill a knight but probably not in battle, and the opportunity to do so would be unlikely to arise because the knight would probably not be in a position to be ambushed. For most peasantry the very thought of going after a knight would also be almost unimaginable. Seems like a not-unreasona…
From my amateur research, this is one of the reasons the Romans were so effective- they weren't always better armed than their opponents, but their culture and training promoted better cohesion. Whereas in the scenario of a medieval peasant facing a knight, even negating the shock value of being charged by mounted troops the knight likely just has far more experience in battle and is less likely to rout. Every peasant revolt I've read about seemed to end with the nobles riding the fleeing peasants down and stabbing them in the backs. Makes one reconsider the modern connotation of the word 'noble', although maybe it was a bit of a euphemism even back then. I know chivalry was much more of an ideal than a creed people actually followed.