Thinking Medieval: Most Scarterrans are carrying a knife
This is part of my "Thinking Medieval" series
In most of medieval Europe, most adults carried a knife with them when they left their homes. Pretty much all the medieval Earth norms with knife-use apply to Scarterra as well.
Knives are not as ubiquitous as hats, but they are pretty ubiquitous.
Execution
Most Scarterrans eat their meals with a knife and a spoon, or they eat with their hands, but only their right hand!. In some parts of Scarterra's southern hemisphere, chopsticks are used. Most spoons are simple pieces of wood carved into a spoon shape by a knife, usually the very knife they are paired with at meal time.
In real world Europe, forks did not become common place at the dinner table until the Renaissance period (and it was usually two-pronged), and the four-pronged fork we know today didn't really become common until the 19th century.
There are always exceptions, but most of the time in Scarterra (and Medieval Europe), if you are invited to dinner at someone else's home, it is standard etiquette to bring your own knife and spoon. This is the standard practice whether you are dining with a family of peasant farmers or were invited into a duke's banquet hall.
This also applies to if you are paying for food and lodging. If you get food from food shops, you are not only expected to bring your knife and spoon, but your own cups and bowls, though many food shops use bread trenchers or hard pie pastries to act as an equivalent to modern disposable "to-go" containers.
In Scarterra, dwarves (who have an abundance of metal and metal workers), like to eat with forks, and those who trade extensively with dwarves often pick up the practice of eating with forks, but most other Scarterrans do not use forks at the dinner table.
Components and tools
At a person's home or business, most Scarterrans have different knives for different jobs, but when traveling it's not reasonable to travel with all of your knives (unless you are a traveling knife merchant).
Relatively well-off probably travel with two knives. One for eating and the other one for everything else.
Poorer people probably only have one knife. They use the same knife for cutting meat, cutting bread, preparing kindling, cleaning their nails, cutting rope, shaving, everything relies on one lovingly maintained all-purpose knife.
A knife is a tool that can easily be used as a weapon, and a dagger is a weapon that can easily be used as a tool. Sometimes the line between what is a knife and what is a dagger is blurry. As long as a person is carrying a dagger openly (as opposed to hiding it in his sleeve), the city guards aren't likely to make a big deal about someone carrying a dagger in public, unless the guards just don't like that person and are looking for any excuse to harass them.
Observance
If a king or queen, count or countess, or high priest or high priestess is having a public audience, basic precautions will be taken to make sure this important person is not stabbed. The guards will politely ask visitors to check their knives (and other potential weapons at the door), and visitors are likely frisked before being allowed entry. Of course they will get their knives back on the way out.
This type of weapons check is only for high status individuals. Most public taverns and market squares don't have a knife check at the entry way. Even if the guards don't let visitors take in swords and axes, they are unlikely to attempt to bar knives from a public space. It is simply not feasible to bar knives from all public areas.
Proportional to their populations, medieval cities had very high murder rates relative to even the most crime-ridden 21st century cities. The high murder rate is due in no small part to the fact that any tavern brawl or rowdy outdoor ball game can potentially turn into a knife fight. This certainly applies to Scarterra.
Eating dinner without a knife
The knives that ancient and Medieval people ate with were usually very sharp. As sharp and pointy as a weaponized dagger. And sometimes, people got stabbed by dinner knives at formal banquets or in taverns. There is a fun Youtube video that covers how chopsticks relate to Confucius and Cardinal Richelieu, but here is the cliff-notes version. The philosopher Confucius disliked people eating with knives and he is said to have endorsed the use of eating with chopsticks in part to avoid sharp knives at the dinner table (around 500 BC). Much later (the 1600s) in history on the other side of the world, Cardinal Richelieu also was against sharp knives at the dinner table and ordered knives to be ground down until they could barely cut anything.
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