Agincourt

An inland diversion after leaving St Valery sur Somme took us through Crecy and on to Azincourt (more familiar to us as Agincourt). The Centre Historique Médiéval d’Azincourt in the village provides a thorough, if a little quirky, explanation of the battle. If you make it through all the displays, interactive exhibits and the film you will have covered the battle three times so you are unlikely to forget in a hurry!

For all of that, it did do a good job of explaining a complex battle and provided some nice touches. One example of this was an exhibit that encouraged you to poke your head into the inside of a helmet to see how much of a view this gave you. After being bludgeoned by the final interactive exhibit (which repeated the words Agincourt 1415 repeatedly as if desperately trying to finish the job of ramming the battle history into your brain) we headed back onto the roads.

The website provides a helpful drive to see the battlefield as it stands today. Amusingly the route is marked by a succession of archers and knights on horseback. Finally, the circular route takes you to a viewing platform (it must get a bit of traffic as they have put a ‘zebra crossing’ in the middle of the country side to serve it!). As with the museum you soon realise that the English and French descriptions on the display boards are not exact translations – most noticeable when the French text refers to “un horrible massacre” whilst the English text is glorying in “a tremendous slaughter”!

Roadside archers at Agincourt!