[quote=Acrolith]And like you said, most would be required to own and practice in the use of a bow or some other form of weapon[/quote]
What I said was that only England did that. And since the vast majority of your workforce are peasants already, getting more of them would require you to recruit them from outside your country. It's not like today, where you have 10% of the population sitting around praying for work.

I would also think that peasants with pikes three times their own length are the last people you send into a city - much less a castle - but I wasn't going to say anything. However, if you [i]want[/i] there to be peasant levies running around, that's much more important than what's realistic or not. Just don't have them make up the majority of the armies of anything - I don't want to dip too far into the grimdark bucket. I play Warhammer for that.