I am currently wondering how a feudal army formed mostly of peasant levy’s would be able to be organised and used tactically in a battle. Were units formed and who would be given the in charge of them?
Did the peasants have any formal military training and how capable would they be in understanding tactics effectively? (Such as to form a shieldwall or to form a schiltron)
Hi there! This is a rather daunting question to answer comprehensively, as it involves various peoples spread over a continent over the course of nearly seven hundred years. Rather than provide a generic answer that will inevitably be wrong to some degree, I'd like to provide you with two links to past answers of mine that treat individual armies and their organization. The first is focused on the army William of Normandy took with him to England in 1066; the latter deals with Richard I's army in the Holy Land in the 1190s.
I will mention in passing that I think it's a mistake to assume that medieval armies were composed of vast numbers of dragooned peasants. Even in Anglo-Saxon England and Carolingian France, where the levy was more extensively used, it seems to have drawn most heavily from the wealthier commons; that is, people who could afford arms and some time to train with them. After ~1000, the general levy fell out of common use on the continent, where armies were increasingly composed of aristocrats, their personal followers, and mercenaries (with some exceptions). The levy persisted to a limited degree in England until the 14th century, though the people being levied seem to have been more or less volunteers, often with prior military experience; it was less a case of the lords and kings rounding up everyone in a village and handing them spears than it was of the king demanding a certain number of soldiers from a given shire, and the local royal officials gathering fighting men, appointing an officer over them, and forwarding them to the muster.