By DCist contributor Jake DeBacher

It’s a hot Saturday afternoon on the grounds of a Virginia winery. Kids chase each other barefoot. Their parents get sun-drunk before they can get wine-drunk. Dogs bolt around the legs of lawn chairs. A guy bashes another over the head with a halberd. A third guy runs up behind the first and swings a mace around his neck, trying to choke him to the ground. In a space roughly the size of a D.C. studio apartment, twenty men clad in full medieval armor are beating the shit out of each other.

It’s a little hard to find the right analogy for the Armored Combat League.

One fighter tells DCist that the difference between the ACL and MMA is a bit like the difference between the XFL and NFL—a similar activity at heart, but with a different kind of ferocity. Another says it is as much a mental activity as physical, akin to tennis.

In practice, though, it’s as though MMA crashed into Medieval Times: people suit up in period-accurate medieval armor and try to bash each other into submission with a variety of swords, maces, polearms, axes, and shields. The weapons are real and heavy and pretty well capable of damaging whatever limb or organ they’re directed at, though blades are dulled and weight limits are strictly observed.

The weapons and armor (and the attendant bashing) were on display at the first annual Mead and Mayhem last month, which doubled as the first ever official ACL battle in the D.C. region.

There was, indeed, plenty of mead and plenty of mayhem.

Hosted by the local ACL chapter, the Washington Juggernauts, the event took place on a rolling spread of land owned by the Mountain Run Winery in Culpeper, Virginia (a town no stranger to combat: it was once the stomping grounds for Ulysses Grant’s Army of the Potomac). The format for the competition was an epic 10-versus-10 all-out brawl, with the Washington Juggernauts (joined by a handful of Baltimore Huns) facing down a regional rival, the New York Sentinels.

An hour before the battle commenced, fighters huddled around anvils to hammer the final rivets into their armor. Each fighter wears around 60 pounds of carefully fitted armor, which is typically made in either the United States or Ukraine, another hotbed of armored combat. In fact, the roots of armored combat as a modern sport trace back about 30 years to Russia, which still dominates the international historical combat scene. Since then, dozens of other countries have formed chapters and joined, under the International Medieval Combat Federation.

There’s an outsider element common among ACL fighters. “They get me, and I get them. You develop a bond with the people you fight with—and those you fight against,” explained Sam Jensen.

Roughly the size and shape of a refrigerator, Jensen is six feet and two inches of giggly, good-natured man. He was one of the early fighters to join the Juggernauts, first fighting with them in October of 2016.”

“I was picked on and bullied all through my childhood, up until I turned 16 and got too big to bully. It left me with a lot of anger,” he said. As it turned out, the ACL was a good outlet for that. “We’re not angry when we’re out there fighting— you’ve just got a lot of fighters who maybe have some anger in them. People who want to vent themselves in a way they never have before.”

The Juggernauts train weekly, at a rotation of houses offered by the group’s seven combat-ready members. That, of course, is in addition to the aggressive personal fitness plan that the team captain, Josh Kearney, demands of his fighters.

Before he joined the ACL, Jensen was a pack-a-day smoker who spent every hour of free time playing video games. Now, he’s kicked both habits in his commitment to the Juggernauts and is in the best shape of his life. Jensen is attending classes for a degree in accounting, and attributes the newfound order in his life in large part to the ACL (and, he told me I had to add, his girlfriend).

Jensen has a different answer every time he’s asked why he fights. “It’s the adrenaline rush, 100 percent” he said first, which was a sentiment echoed by a number of other fighters. Later, he attributed it to the camaraderie. When he was about to take to the battleground, all that was on his mind was to “kick ass and win” and to become the “badass king of the nerds.” And, while he didn’t say it directly, it’s clear he also appreciates the opportunity for glory.

And so, after the mead-and-sun-dazed audience was brought to attention; after the man in a tunic tried to shout the rules and inspire the audience with the high principles of Armored Combat; after a javelin was thrust directly at the audience through the battleground’s barred enclosure to demonstrate the need for ten-foot clearance at all times; after the rule was immediately flouted by a heavily-accented Virginian wearing an American flag tank top; after incense was burned on a gathered bunch of steel helms; after the tunicked crier cried the names of the fighters for the Juggernauts and the Sentinels and ten combatants lined up across from each other and the crier cried “Fight!” and each line approached eachother warily and finally a sword-and-punch-shield-wielding knight threw himself with surprising agility into the densest pack of his opponents, they fought. And it became immediately clear that this fight would not go as planned.

The format for the day, a 10-versus-10 brawl, called for sets of three rounds, with a ten-minute break in between. The winner of a round was simply the team with the last man standing, and the first team to win 11 rounds would be the day’s winner. The scale of the battle was unusual; typical ACL events are fought in three-on-three or five-on-five formats.

But after the very first round, a handful of fighters staggered out of the battleground and crashed down (testing the structural integrity of vineyard lawn chairs) to have their helmets tugged off and their breastplates unstrapped, faces blasted red with heat and exertion, but still seeming somehow pale. Alternates were called in for the fighters who could not immediately return to the enclosure for round two.

The event had been scheduled for 4 p.m. so that the fighting would begin as the day’s heat began to wane, but the organizers underestimated the tenacity of the Virginia sun.

Over the course of the ensuing match, it became clear that combatants on both sides were fighting the same battle, against an inescapable enemy. Gradually the number of capable fighters dwindled, even as the breaks between rounds and sets were extended so the fighters could pop their lids and force water and pickles (for the electrolytes) down their throats.

One fighter, an electrical engineer who goes by the moniker “Z,” was practically parboiled inside his armor after just a few rounds: “I went out there and my muscles started to seize up immediately,” he said. “I couldn’t untense anything, and the heat made it impossible to pause for a sec and collect myself.”

Before the fight he’d said: “We’re crazy, not stupid.” As an onlooker, they seemed both.

For levity (or perhaps to keep them from finding sticks and waging wars of their own), children were allowed onto the battleground between each set and armed with foam weapons to play-act their own battle.

But when their games ended and the battle of the adults resumed, the referees noticed a fighter, still fully armored, lying prone and motionless. Medics were summoned, who revived him.

In the very next round, the teams battled it out until only two fighters remained, who continued the brawl until notified by a referee that they were on the same team. “Sorry, buddy” could be heard from one to the other.

At what seemed to be an arbitrary point, conceding the losing battle against the heat, the team captains, referees, and tournament organizers exited a huddle and announced that, with the Sentinels ahead by one point, they’d only need one more to clinch the victory; the Juggernauts would need two consecutive wins to steal it from behind.

Perhaps buoyed by a potential comeback win, the Juggernauts rallied and took the victory (if in slightly sluggish form). And, after a painfully lopsided one-on-one showmatch in which a slender fighter took a thorough beating by a fighter twice his size, Mead and Mayhem was over. But not before the Juggernauts’ captain, Josh Kearney, made a surprise announcement: he would be passing leadership off to Sam Jensen. The announcement was met by a chorus of Jensen’s nickname: “Swamp Thing! Swamp Thing! Swamp Thing!”

If you’re interested in following the Juggernauts, or joining them as a fighter, check out the group’s Facebook page.