Yet at Morgarten the Swiss massacred a Habsburg force. Armoured knights need an open battlefield to be effective, in crowded terrain a force made up of peasant fighters equipped with polearms is clearly superior.

Polearms were always very effective against mounted troops, if they were disciplined enough to use them together.

Even in the Napoleonic wars the best defence against cavalry was the square with soldiers using bayonets on their muskets.

Peut-etre fondue et racelette est la vraie potion magique?

Maybe fondue and hard cheese is the true magic potion.

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 a quote, just an Asterix reference- the savage tribes fighting off the (Holy) Roman Empire. Would be unseemly to make it in English.

Thank you:-)

Still, with a dagger and skill, you could penetrate allmost all armor.

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.

This sounds tautological? Why would people wear ineffective armour?

Knights aren't gladiators. Full armor is effective in the context of a larger fight.

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.["