@dennislp3
So let me see if I can picture the kind of medieval combat you are painting a picture of: A combatant would on a regular basis decide to ignore using his primary weapon (sword, axe, etc) because grappling with an armed man is more effective, then he would kick, punch, push or pull because that's somehow less risky than striking with your main weapon, even kicking which makes you completely unbalanced, on one leg and all, to unbalance his opponent, while his opponent is trying to take his head off with a longer range weapon. Then, at some point, the combatant rushes in to grapple, trying to dance around his opponent's weapon AND his shield, then he drops his own weapon or shield or both to be able to grapple at close range, and possibly takes out a shorter dagger, while he can't see what his opponent is doing, who might well be hacking his legs off, or running a sword through him, which is possible at pretty much any range (real one handed swords aren't as long as the hollywood variety), or bonking him on the head with the pommel. I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on this, cause that doesn't seem very realistic to me. Not saying it would never happen, but I just don't see it happening on a regular basis, as opposed to the typical sword and ax strikes.
The combat reenactments people are typically people interested in medieval times, so they study the subject matter in great detail and train using realistic weapons and armor. They are not actors in that sense, as they try to model their behavior on history. The only difference is they typically make the edged weapons blunt, so as not to really hurt each other during sparring, otherwise it's fairly realistic. There are some very educational videos on youtube from some of those people, so I would personally imagine that those videos are as good a guide as we can get (along with texts from those times) these days.
As far as the arena mode stuff I set up, I had the combatants be a grand master in their weapon skill, and shield/armor skills, no points at all in striking, kicking, biting or wrestling. As I mentioned before though, the hand to hand stuff seemed to happen a lot more with hammer dwarves, and quite a bit less with sword dwarves.