How do you train and equip the peasants for battle in a pre-gunpowder setting...

Shields and spears, Polearms or pikes.

In most late and high medieval army those guys were paid the lowest and required the least training. Armour is optional but recommended for those using pikes or polearms. at least the first few ranks should have that.

Ok, what's with the pole? I thought carrying your own bit of the fortifications around died with the romans?

stakes for stopping horse charges. i dont know if they carried a stake along with them or just chopped trees down.

You could always use crossbows. Crossbows function similar to guns, in that they are simple to use and allow someone to become proficient with little training.

Except they are expensive if they're not those cheapo wooden things and require maintenance.

Pointy sticks were the premier weapon of war even well after the invention of firearms.

they've got green socks on their heads and pink cages on their dicks. Fuckin paddies

>older peasants
>tight spear/pike formation with basic shields
>younger peasants
>slings bows and pointy sticks

Also if its for defending their village teach them about basic stuff like spiky defences and what to look for from nearby vantage points

Have them be Swedish peasants who were during the middle ages were legally required to have.
A spearsword, a plate vest, a seax, some ranged weapond.

As a legal requirement.

The Swiss would disagree.

Spear and shield.

Polearms and spears are the way to go if the enemy has armor.

There already have been good answers, so I'll add just one thing: you establish friendly competitions with weapons of war. Local tournaments and the like. The English did that with shooting competitions, because you need developed musculature to be a proper archer. Also don't forget to give them proper benefits if they rank high (aka money). Don't give out any benefits just for participating, you want them to train of their own motivation during peacetime and push them to increase their limits.

>You look rich, go buy a horse and a lance
>You look strong, go practice with a bow
>You look... average. Here's a pointy stick and a wooden board

>Here's the 4-1-1 folks: say some "gangsta" is dissing your "peasant swag". You just shoot arrows at them until they get close, then use the pokey-boardey guys to hold them in place and the cloppy-cloppy's to attack them from behind.

Train them for guerrilla tactics, if you want to keep 'period' call them 'brigand tactics'.
Armed with helmet, shield, and javelins (with amentum) they should be effective cheap skirmishers.
With more money, we can look at polearms and crossbows, making a sort of early 'pike&shot' formation. With more time and no money, we can train them with bow and slings, but it takes YEARS to get gud with those.

>Train them for guerrilla tactics, if you want to keep 'period' call them 'brigand tactics'.
Is that really a good thing? Guerilla tactics imply that the enemy is already occupying your territory. Given that we're talking about a random peasant village, an enemy is just going to loot and/or burn shit. Especially when we're talking about bandits rather than a foreign army.

Muslim Vampires probably

Even raiders have some sort of supply lines that can be hit.
Villages would be better defended by an armed militia with polearms and scorpios or mangonels behind the village palisade, but that's expensive and leaves the farms wide open.
It's probably the better idea tho.

Except they had heavy armor, retard

Teach them kung fu and chemistry.

No, they didn't. Being able to move quickly while in close formation was their thing until after they started operating predominantly as mercenaries and had their own realm.

IIRC most medieval armies just lived off the land even in friendly territory and supply lines weren't really a thing. You could ambush the guys they send out to forage but all that's likely to do is cause them to forage in even larger groups and start hanging civilians.

Well there's a thought.

Beat them, rape their women in front of them, and then do an open-air vivisection 1 out of every 25 men in the village center.

Then tell them that the enemy is worse.

Battle of the golden spurs would disagree

hand them dull knives and say they are magical. Nothing prepares the masses like blind zeal.

Longbows, guv. Get a huntsman or two, get 'em to teach the rest how to train for ranged combat because they'd be fucked in any sort of close quarters engagement.

Firstly, training is more or less impossible without instructors of some kind who'll teach the militia hand to hand combat and tactics. You'd need to find some old mercenaries or sergeants to train the troops.

Equipment wise, a peasant militia will be armed with whatever weapons and tools that are available to them, or whatever weapons they can manufacture themselves, sometimes by modifying existing tools. Standard ranged weapons would be hunting bows, slings, rocks. Melee weapons would be axes, flails, knives, clubs and, to keep cavalry at bay, improvised spears. If the militia does have some resources, pole weapons like voulges, fauchards, guisarmes, lochaber axes, halberds and of course spears will be the most important weapons, allowing the militia to deal with armored opponents. Keep in mind that those weapons require training to be effectively used in combat. In term of armor, there won't be many options for the militia - armor is expensive (metal armor is expensive and slow to manufacture and requires special knowledge, even making the fabric for padded armor is time-consuming and requires equipment). Therefore, most militiamen will therefore have no armor at all. If the militia does have time and resources, wooden shields can be manufactured, and maybe padded armor, too. Apart of that, the main source of advanced weapons and armor will come from looting or trading captured equipment.

You really can't. That's why feudalism developed and WORKED

Give them a bow.

Generally you don't, in these sorts of battles these people are going to eat your food, fail to obey orders, break on contact and just generally get in the way. Semi-professional soldiery did exist but most militia were formed in larger settlements by wealthy individuals.

If they're fighting at all then their not peasants the vast majority of the time, their freemen who chose to be there.