Pleasantry of the Peasantry

Some of Jack Whyte's work had me interested in midevil community leadership and the starkly different roles of knights and priests in those communities. This led me to wonder about the 3rd role, the peasant. On the battlefield they were known for being archers, and while looking into this I found this on Wikipedia:

 ...all "citizens, burgesses, free tenants, villeins and others from 15 to 60 years of age" should be armed.^[64] The poorest of them were expected to have a halberd and a knife, and a bow if they owned land...

Interesting, because archer's close range strategy would have been to parry with the bow in their left hand while stabbing away with a long knife in their right hand, and one major strategy for dealing with close range encounters with a long weapon is to draw a knife and stab away. So this suggests an alternative fighting style for peasants compared to knights: knights have an expensive high quality one handed weapon combined with a shield (even their long weapon on a horse is one handed), while the Peasant instead uses two handed weapons (including projectile weapons and polearms), pulling their one handed knives at close range.

My background in long weapons is about a year of Bokenjitsu as it is practiced in Aikido, and studying the single-and-double-ended staff in Doc Fai Wong's system. From there I started experimenting with long weapons technique at Tres Espadas:


Ultimately I deduced a long weapon style very similar to the one displayed in this NOT-Tres-Espadas video:


Or in other words (see "Naginata KO" for "1st match"):


In all cases we have the unexpected condition where when you have long weapons, you are more likely to grapple. One place this is mentioned by historians is in the "push of pike":

One of my speculations on the martial arts is that all cultures have some form of grappling, and grappling in various midevil cultures took place. Weapons designed for non-professional warriors like peasants would have had a strong grappling component. As expected, the formal documentation of halberd technique of that time suggests numerous take downs:


Notice that in some of the above examples:

• the knife keeps coming out and
• the Halberd/Pole Ax is a double ended weapon like the staff, and not as single ended as most spears. 

The clichés in Robin Hood make a lot sense in this context: the staff grappling on the log bridge over the stream, practiced by the same cut-throats doing the archery, while the knights become simple victims of a peasant revolt in spite of their more expensive weapons, horses, armor, training, etc.