Azincourt: Henry V's Battlefield, Fressin Castle and Hesdin

Required Activities

• In the Centre Azincourt 1415, work out how 6,000 men beat a far larger army: find where Erpingham's archers stood on the flanks, the 200 he hid in the wood of Tramecourt against encirclement, and the chronicler's line about French troops wading through mud up to their knees

• Walk the signposted circuit out to the battle site midway between Azincourt, Tramecourt and Maisoncelle, and stand in the narrowest part of the clearing between the woods of Azincourt and Tramecourt — the 600 m of ploughed ground Henry advanced into so the French would have to come to him

• Walk the ruins of Fressin, the 15th-century fortress of Jean V de Créquy with its eight cylindrical towers and its artillery bastions, and go down into the souterrains under it

• Walk Hesdin from its market square to the Canche, the town where the king's procurator at the bailliage had a son on 1 April 1697 — the abbé Prévost, schooled here by the Jesuits before he wrote Manon Lescaut

• If you are here in July of an even-numbered year, walk the medieval encampment and craft market at Azincourt's biennial fête, where the battle is re-enacted and men fight in armour