Azincourt in the Pas-de-Calais, a village of a few hundred people whose vanished castle gave its name to Henry V’s victory of 25 October 1415 — fought in the ploughland between Azincourt, Tramecourt and Maisoncelle, and commemorated today by the Centre Historique Médiéval opened in 2001.
Agincourt (Azincourt) in northern France was the site of the Battle of Agincourt on 25 October 1415, where Henry V of England defeated a much larger French force commanded by Charles d’Albret during the Hundred Years’ War.
The battle became one of the defining military events of the fifteenth century and shaped English memory of the war.
The village itself sits on the open chalk of the Ternois in the Pas-de-Calais, on the road between Hesdin and Fruges, about nineteen kilometres north-west of Saint-Pol-sur-Ternoise. It is small now and was smaller then: a castle, a church and the farms that worked the surrounding fields.
The name appears as Aisincurt in 1165 and runs through a series of forms — Azincurt, Aisincourt — before settling as Azincourt, the spelling made official in 1793. Like the many -court names of Picardy and Artois it is Gallo-Roman in formation, from cortem, a farm or estate, preceded by a Germanic personal name, generally read as Aizo.
The lordship was held in 1415 by Regnault d’Azincourt, lord of Azincourt and Rutel, born about 1358, who was killed in the battle along with his kinsmen Jean and Walerand d’Azincourt. The castle from which the family took its name, and which gave the battle its name, stood near the village and has left nothing above ground; by the nineteenth century the place was a cluster of farmhouses and cottages, and the settlement itself had only taken the castle’s name in the seventeenth century.
The fighting took place about halfway between the villages of Azincourt, Tramecourt and Maisoncelle, in a strip of open field roughly a kilometre wide with woods closing it on either side. That constriction is the whole tactical story of the day: the French could not use their numbers, and the English archers on the flanks shot into a column that had nowhere to spread.
The field had been newly sown and was soaked by rain the night before the battle, and heavy ground is what the chroniclers remember most vividly. Men-at-arms in full harness advancing several hundred yards through wet clay arrived exhausted, and those who fell in the press could not rise.
Henry V’s army was exhausted, depleted by dysentery, and outnumbered when the battle began. The French cavalry advance across muddy terrain into concentrated English archery created catastrophic losses among the French nobility. Thousands of French prisoners were killed during the battle.
The French dead included Charles d’Albret and many of France’s leading nobles. Henry’s victory led to the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, which recognized him as heir to the French throne, though the agreement collapsed after his death in 1422.
The dead were buried in pits on the field and at the nearby abbey of Auchy and the churches of the district; the grave pits have never been securely located, and the survey work done on the battlefield has produced very little metalwork, since the ground was stripped of armour and weapons immediately and has been ploughed ever since. A calvary and other memorials stand on the field, and a modern viewing point looks over it from the Azincourt side.
A museum of the battle opened in the village in 2001 as the Centre Historique Médiéval, in a building whose roofline was designed to suggest a drawn longbow, with models, films and reconstructed equipment; it was rebuilt and reopened as Azincourt 1415 on 29 August 2019. A medieval festival has been held in the village since 2004.
Agincourt is one of the few villages whose name became a word. English writing took it up almost at once, and Shakespeare’s Henry V fixed it in a form that has shaped how the battle is remembered far more than any chronicle: the phrase about the happy few belongs to 1599, not to 1415.
What the visitor finds is a working farming village of a few hundred people on an exposed plateau, with the woods of Tramecourt still marking one edge of the field. The scale of the place against the scale of its fame is the point that the ground itself makes best.