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by questionfor 2050 days ago

People who suggest that knights could be defeated by peasants in one-on-one or even one-on-many combat often overlook that many (or most?) knights spent their time practicing how to kill people in combat. Peasants on the other hand were busy tending to their land or cattle or doing whatever they had to survive. The modern analogy for adult peasant fighting an adult knight would be a bar fight between a random bystander and a UFC fighter. Now imagine the UFC fighter is wearing armor (and is trained to fight in armor) and is equipped with a deadly weapon of his choice (and has been training to fight with it). If you think there is a remote chance for any outcome besides death of the knight’s opponent (also death at the moment and in a form of the knight’s choosing), try going to a local boxing gym (or jiu-jitsu club etc.) and challenging one of their trainers, then multiply the results by 10 (in trainer’s favor).

I can’t imagine how 10+ years of training could not give a knight an infinite advantage even if we equalize the combatants in terms of equipment.

Also knights were training to fight since they were children, so in our hypothetical bar fight the pro-fighter’s skills would be along the lines of those of Floyd Mayweather (who started training when he was 9). Surely the knight may be less gifted, but that matter should really concern other knights and not peasants :)

49 vs 9000 scenario described in the post seems grotesque but I think, limiting the number of slain civilians by knights’ stamina and assuming that any resistance is negligible is more than reasonable.

5 comments

scottlocklin 2050 days ago

It's not clear that knightly training was as useful as UFC training. Ineffective martial arts were a big deal for literal decades before the Gracie family came along, I guess because people didn't want to put in a mouth guard and see what happens. How often did the knights actually see combat, as opposed to train for combat, and do non-lethal sparring? The one form of training which is of undoubted utility is group tactics, but it's unclear what the non-mounted training was for this sort of thing for most times/places.

You're also probably discounting what peasant style manual labor (and hobbies, which include beating the shit out of each other with fists, clubs, etc) does for your combat ability. Hand and wrist strength is a huge deal in pre-firearms days, and peasants were at least 3-4 standard deviations stronger in these ways than average people now (really: that much -I've fooled around with building hand strength and it's bonkers how strong people can get in this domain). People basically exerted their strength through simple hafted tools all day; makes them good at exerting their strength through simple hafted tools all day. Regarding group tactics; peasants had lots of games which could have helped them with this. For example, Hurling[0], and I'm sure there was lots of stuff like Calcio Storico[1].

The real advantage the knights had (beyond equipment, like horses and the morale of feeling superior to the peasant) was probably nutrition. They spent most of their downtime hunting, feasting and eating meat, and between wearing heavy armor and their strength oriented workouts, the knights were probably pretty jacked. 50 or 100lbs of muscle and fat and 6-8" of height helps a lot. I don't have references in front of me for this, but David Willoughby talks about some of this in his book, and I'm sure you can see it in skeletons of Nobles versus peasants (aka Nobles will have larger skeletons with 'deformities' at the muscle attachment points).