Seems like a not-unreasonable comparison today would be "could a civilian kill an armored vehicle?"
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.
Feudal lords have pretty much always taken whatever liberties they like with the local people: rape, theft, property destruction, murder, torture, kidnapping, ...
Medieval knights were little different than the thug soldiers of any modern criminal gang, except less checked by state power.
Defense, research, some higher level medicine, engineering, etc...
They would get money from rents, but were expected to spend that money in weapons, equipment for their civilian profession if they had any (for example building a telescope) etc...
And of course it worked MOST of the time, but not ALL the time, sometimes you had people that became infamous, like that "vampire" lady that killed a ton of random people to bathe in their blood...
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2z7t3k/plate...
Even in the Napoleonic wars the best defence against cavalry was the square with soldiers using bayonets on their muskets.
So even my bad French can get the translation - it what does it mean? :-)
It smells like something out of Asterix - but what is the quote from?
Not very helpful in 1 vs 1 for the peasant, but in the chaos of the battlefield, very possible. And like others have mentioned: with a polearm and skill, much better chances for the peaseant.
A disciplined force of polearm carriers could have (and did) defeat full armored knights. But there is the greates difference: a peasant usually was not in the position to receive military training at all, while the knights were trained for war since being childs.
Individually, a knight on foot isn't catching anyone and can probably be poked until exhausted with any stick longer than whatever weapon he's carrying.
Mounted, someone in the ground has little to no chance at all if the horse is capable of moving. On clear ground, the horse is the weapon.
From the wiki page on Agincourt:
"Recent heavy rain made the battle field very muddy, proving very tiring to walk through in full plate armour. The French monk of St. Denis describes the French troops as "marching through the middle of the mud where they sank up to their knees. So they were already overcome with fatigue even before they advanced against the enemy". The deep, soft mud particularly favoured the English force because, once knocked to the ground, the heavily armoured French knights had a hard time getting back up to fight in the mêlée. Barker states that some knights, encumbered by their armour, actually drowned in their helmets.["
In that case, isn't the answer a definite yes?
Knowing how to destroy an armored vehicle is not a common knowledge around where I live.
It is given for granted however that around the world people are creative, can learn new things, and generally could figure out how to make explosives.
And I guess they still qualify as civilians.
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...
However this doesn't fit the "A peasant vs. a Knight" comaprison. A huge mass can also easily stop and defeat a knight.
No. A knight prone on the ground was very easy to kill very quickly - just stick a dagger through the visor. There is nothing comparable a civilian today can do to an APC.
Additionally, a single knight on a horse was not that hard to take down using relatively easily-available polearms, at least to a group of peasants. It doesn't scale down linearly - 40:9000 is a very different matter than 1:200, because a charge of 40 mounted knights is still inescapable death to the part of the enemy force they're charging at. A single knight would be much less terrifying even to a relatively group of peasants.
Armour in built up areas is very risky with out infantry support and the APC's would not be just driving around with out having dismounts supporting them.
Modern armor isn't invulnerable, but as I suggested it isn't easy to take out and likely would achieve similar to 40:9000 or worse in confrontations with civilians. Thankfully armor rolling over civilians like that isn't common enough for me to pull actual statistics, so we have to guess at efficacy compared to knights fighting peasants.
The armored vehicle analogy is apt.
Back to the analogy, a peasant (in the modern sense) is unlikely going to be as able to obtain an anti-tank or armor piercing rounds as easily as a peasant (medieval sense) could pick up a pike.
I'm certain that more than one knight died locked inside a burning barn back in the days.