Conscripts and Soldiers were armed, that's not in debate, during war time people were often conscripted, armed, and trained, perhaps not with the best gear, but they were outfitted.
But during normal times, or for those not conscripted and left in the fields, this was not the case, though it did vary wildly by time and place.
In England in the 1100s, every freeman that owned land was expected to own armour and arms of their own, so that they could be called to become soldiers for the king, and the offside of this is that if you were not a member of the groups that were required to be armed in such a way then you were not allowed to be unless you were conscripted for war. This was Henry II's main method of trying to strengthen his own forces, while also trying to keep weapons out of the hands of the non-english populations of the isles.
In the late medieval Spain, only nobility and knights were allowed to carry or display swords openly, and although there were further ownership laws against the owning of swords, it was one of those laws that was only really enforced when people made a big deal of it, as long as you didn't walk around with your sword out or make a point of telling everyone you knew that you have one, it was usually fine. However, by that point laws were being passed to restrict the open carrying or even owning of weapons in general, not because of war, but because governments were attempting to reduce incidents of street violence or domestic violence involving weapons. This was also the case in france, until open carrying of swords and rapiers was finally flat out banned in the 1800s. And people began punching each other instead.
Yeomen typically owned and maintained their own arms and armor, conscript levies were outfitted by the nobleman raising the army, which is one of the many reasons that spear and shield was still popular, in that they were cheap to have made in comparison to other weapons and forms of protection.
There were laws concerning openly carrying swords in largers cities, almost no European country, banned non-nobility from owning swords. By the end of the 15th century, there were schools specializing in swordsmanship all over Europe, and by the end of the 16th century pretty much any man who could afford one, carried a sword at the time.
Sword carrying laws in medieval EnglandWhile medieval and early modern weapons possession is often associated with the nobility, townspeople and even villagers possessed swords, pikes, guns and pistols and kept them in their private homes.
A good guy with a sword. Weapons and communal culture in sixteenth-century GermanyRebellions didn't usually consist out of professional armies.
See for example the warscythe or flails
Why would you choose to use a repurposed farm tool, when you could purchase a sword for 2 pence by the end of the 15th century?
The majority of all weapons throughout history are either converted tools or (more commonly) designs derived from tools. The exception is mainly spears, maces, and (if we don't count them as derived from knives) swords. Particularly polearms tend to just literally be a farm tool on a stick. Flails, bill hooks, war scythes, guisarmes and voulges, every nasty way to hook or chop somebody from afar, war hammers and war picks. In fact every weapon called a "war [tool name]" could with almost certainty be assumed to be such.
That's just simply not true. Quality arms manufacturing has been important, for literally all of recorded human history. You are repeating misconceptions popularized by movies, that you could just take your farm tools, turn them into weapons, and march off to war in the medieval period, and there is no historical veracity to those claims. Poorly equipped conscript armies, were still supplied with some form of military weaponry, typically spear and shield since they were cheap and quick to produce, but better equipped armies a sword was a standard infantry weapon as well.
Famous Makers of Arms and Armors and European Centers of ProductionThe military flail, of which hollywood is very fond of, most likely did not exist as an actual battlefield weapon:
The Curious Case of the Weapon that Didn’t ExistAn agricultural flail, even the two-handed version, would be a terrible weapon all around, given that the conscript infantry you'd be facing, would be most assuredly using spear and shield, and any man-at-arms you faced would be armored to the point of laughably walking up and choking you to death. From a physics standpoint, it's terrible as a weapons, and you'd be better off just using a staff.
