While reading “the pillars of the earth”, I got really surprised by the description of the battle of Lincoln. King Stephen decides to let peasants and poor citizens fight on the back line, which apparently is described as a common sense tactic since they will cause more harm than good in the front line and will also have minimal casualties on the back. Which is really far from what I would have imagined which would be: peasants used as a meat shield on the front to spare the valuable fighters as king as possible.
I should be very wary of thinking about 'meat shields'; such a concept is applicable in Warhammer 40k, but most assuredly not in Medieval European warfare, where a wholly different set of social and cultural mores permeate the battlefield. More can always be said on the matter, especially since my Medieval Armies Compilation is ever hungry for more posts. For the meantime, here are some previous posts that examine the matter: