Road trip to Azincourt & Crécy-en-Ponthieu part 2

A continuation from part 1

A half hour drive down further south from Azincourt and we arrived at Crécy-en-Ponthieu.

There is a tower from which you can overlook the battlefield and I believe it stands on the spot where there used to be the windmill from where Richard III coördinated the battle. Atop was also handy plaque with the English deployments and the French advance.

I kind of crapped this up when taking two seperate photos

There seems to have been another informative panel next to the tower, however this was destroyed. There was a simple monument, a stone mosaic portraying the English and French coats-of-arms, of which its spotlight was sadly broken and the tower itself too looked like it had seen its best time already.

"To John of Luxemburg, king of Bohemia,
and his valiant comrades-in-arms who died
for France at Crécy on August 26, 1346"

In the centre of town, apart from a monument commemorating  the blind king John of Bohemia, there is not much to remeind anybody of the battle. The town as well its small museum looked dilapidated, even the office of tourism seemed shy to mention the battle of Crécy. Which is somewhat understandable however it's just bad business. There could be much money to be had if they would let go the foolishness and capitalize on their defeat. I had the same feeling in Azincourt, there could be just so much more. Both towns could make their entire living on those two battlefields if they just wanted to capitalize on it...

Now the museum itself, if it warrants to be called a museum, was somewhat hidden away in a small street near the main road of town. Located in what must have been once a little school, the museum consists of three chambers. What? I hear you ask. Yes, three classrooms is all you get. However the entry price was only 2€ so that evened things out.

The first room was dedicated to the battle of Crécy, with the obligatory maquette, battlefield finds and replica's. If there's one thing they need bad, it's a decent Perry's diorama of the battle :D

The second room Held for some part other local finds not connected to the battle itself and gifts from a medieval reenactement group.

It also had this, and it sort of made up
for the crappiness of my Crécy experience

The third room contained a lot of stuff from World War II, mostly things that probably belonged to the locals or maybe smalltime collectors. If I understood correctly there would have been a V1 launch facility nearby.



And since I was there I also went by the nearby town of Domvast because of this article.

It was also posted on the TMP messageboards.

Source: Medievalists.net

I have no pictures of the proposed battlefield because I fudged up again like I did at Azincourt a few hours earlier. Drivind down the Rue du Mont de Foret I was looking at the right side instead of the left side... I should have taken the D12 route into Domvast, to really get a good look at it however that road was closed for reparations and I ended up driving aimlessly around only to admit defeat in my search. Well, at least its a good excuse for a second visit at another time.

From there we drove onwards to the seaside, halting for a while on a small beach town called Stella-Plage, before going to Montreuil. As you can see in the next photos is a fortified city from a much later age than  Crécy or Azincourt. By the location of the sun you can also see that we were just too late to enter the citadel which housed a museum of the local history. For the interested, the citadel was built in 1567 on the place of an older 13th century castle, its ramparts were built in 1670.

A last note for the interested is that the city of Montreuil has a pub, "Le Douglass", on its main square. But instead of getting any Irish; English; Scottish; or even Welsh drinks, you could only get imported Belgian beers and a few local ones. Weirdest 'pub' I've been too so far. Nice people though.