Yes war/military flails are likely to not have been used, or at least not to any discernable degree, in real life. Which is why I didn't mention it. The flail, however,
have much more historical documentation, up to and including instructions on usage and defence in martial art manuals (and there's also the nunchuck which, though ceremonial as it might be, is still a flail repurposed for martial arts). Whether or not it is smart to use over other tools available is another question entirely -- people are not 110% rational beings and desperate people use what they have at hand, not what they coulda shoulda woulda gotten.
And you know, that was just one weapon. Are you also denying the use of bills, voulges, war scythes, and the others I mentioned? Or, say, of the Dacian Falx, the South Asian kukri, or the kama -- all sickle weapons?
I'm not denying that you could use an agricultural flail as a weapon in a pinch (though you'd be better off just using a staff because of the physics of the transfer of force), I'm denying the hollywood misconception you are promoting, that conscript levies in the middle ages, were just farmers who picked up their tools turned them into weapons, and marched off to war. That is wholly incorrect.
If you want to read about the German Peasants War, where actual poorly armed peasants did form an army that started with farmers with military experience using their farm tools and hastily made "war scythes" (flipping a scythe blade vertically, forging a socket on it, and attaching it to the end of a stout pole), and ended up being filled with local militia that were supplied with pike/short sword/breast plate by village authority, mercenaries, disaffected knights, and professional soldiers, then I'd suggest
The German Peasants' War: A History in Documents (German Studies)As to the rest of that about sickles etc, none of those are what soldiers on battlefields were fighting with, not even in SE Asia, China, and India in the middle ages. Bows, swords, spear/shield, javelins, pikes, etc, were all the commonplace weapons of war on the battlefield; not nunchaku which has no traditional kata, and was never used by soldiers of any army of record.
