might not have been a bed of roses, it certainly beat the alternatives if you got involved in warfare. Leaving aside the peasant families burned out of their homes and left to starve or the populations of besieged cities facing starvation, disease or the horrors of a sacking (and this sort of behaviour was central to the practice of medieval warfare, not just some kind of early version of "collateral damage"), a knight probably had a better chance of survival on the battlefield than anybody else there. Admittedly it was no joke sharging into an English arrow storm or trying to tacked a Hussite gun laager or even taking on a mass of Scottish or Swiss spearmen, but even when the balance on the battlefield had begin to shift away from armoured cavalrymen you still had a better chance of survival. You'd be better armoured and better horsed and above all you were worth money alive- so if you did end up unhorsed and wounded amid the enemy the chances were that they'd be queuing up to take your surrender.

Few infantry were so lucky. Archers might well be mutilated to make them militarily ineffective. Early gunners were sometimes hanged out of hand. There was no easy way of hanging on to large numbers of prisoners in a world without barbed wire or multiple shot weapons. If infantry prisoners were taken they might well be offered the option of changing sides- with execution the alternative. Normally, though, a medieval army which broke suffered the majority of its casualties as men tried to run away and were cut down fleeing the field. Or they stood their ground in a slaughtering match like Verneuil in 1424.

www.shef.ac.uk/assem/issue6/Roses_web.html

gives some idea of just how messy and gruesome the consequences of a medieavl battle could be for the unmounted, non-chivaric, rank and file.