Historians tell me that in medieval Europe, nobles customarily wore swords, and had no compunction about drawing them in self-defense. Also, medieval Europe had street-fights, brawls, and bandits, so even nobles and middle-class burghers sometimes had to defend themselves. In some cases, sumptuary laws limited the right to carry weapons, but they seem to have been primarily about pretending to be upper-class. The problem was not peasants with swords; the problem AFAICT was a peasant in expensive clothing might be allowed to behave like a noble.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumptuary_law
Historians also tell me I've gotten bad ideas from popular myths:
http://www.thearma.org/essays/TopMyths.htm
My question, then, is: what is the historical evidence that non-noble medieval European city-dwellers, such as cobblers and tanners and brewers, exercised their rights to self-defense? (I imagine someone has written a book about this already, and it's just a question of reading the proper book.)
I think seaports are the most interesting category of medieval cities for this question, because they probably had a lot of sailors in from out of town, which probably led to brawls.
Thanks in advance.
"Self defense" is perhaps a bit of a loaded term, but there is plenty of evidence that non-aristocratic medieval Europeans often owned/used weapons. I cited some examples of laws and incidents in this comment here. In general, laws restricting weapons were more focused on what was being done with weapons rather than the weapons themselves. So there were no English laws prohibiting regular people from owning swords, but there were laws prohibiting you from running around the streets of London getting into fights while armed with sword and buckler. You could (and we know from wills that many people did) own all the swords you could afford. However, unless you were an official of the king, an aristocrat, or a traveler/soldier making your way to some other place, you would not be allowed to bear arms openly in London in the 14th century. That's according to the letter of the law, anyways. It seems from the frequency of violations that there were plenty of people who did it anyways.