Indeed! A few years ago I saw a show on the History Channel about arms and armor through the ages. In the times "when knighthood was in flower," armor and weapons were not cheap. Using all the methods economists like to use to show equivalent prices, a good broadsword would cost about $15,000 to $20,000 in modern terms. The narrator commented that when you see a group of peasants wielding broadswords in a historical movie, that just didn't happen back then. The peasant's weapon might be something like a pitchfork or a scythe, and more often than not, the foot soldier's weapon was the pike—a bit of nastiness attached to the end of a long pole.
But, he said, most people did have some kind of knife. It good, serviceable knife was an all-purpose tool.