Berkeley Castle

Berkeley Castle stands in the town of Berkeley in Gloucestershire, above the vale that runs down to the River Severn. Its name has also been spelled Berkley and Barkley, and it is pronounced to rhyme with bark. The stone that shows today is a warm pink, and the battlements on the outer face drop about sixty feet to the Great Lawn, while the inner courtyard is smaller and more domestic, with uneven wall-tops and doors and windows of many shapes. It is a Grade I listed building.

The shell keep, the curtain wall, and the inner bailey survive in an unusually complete state, down to doors, arrow slits, windows, and iron catches. The place has been described as the third-oldest castle in England still lived in without a break, after the Tower of London and Windsor Castle, and as the oldest still owned and occupied by one family. It has also been described as the oldest building in the country still inhabited by the family who built it. Those two claims do not say quite the same thing, and both are in circulation.

The ground under the later castle was occupied long before any Norman lord arrived. In 2005, in the kitchen gardens, a training excavation found parts of a ring ditch that might have circled a house, prehistoric flint tools, and a few fragments of human bone, immediately under Victorian flower beds and greenhouses. Very few prehistoric burials are known in the Severn Vale, where most such finds lie on the Cotswold hills. The settlement may have stood on a low ridge so that it could be seen from the Severn, and it may have helped people find their way up the Berkeley Pill.

The same long campaign of digging, which ran from a first season in 2005 to a last season in 2019, later judged that Berkeley probably began as a Roman settlement. The castle’s own account of the town adds that there was a large Saxon settlement and possibly a Roman temple. Coins from the digs run from the Roman occupation through to the eighteenth century.

An Anglo-Saxon religious house stood on or near the site. One season of the project spoke of an Anglo-Saxon abbey close to the castle. The published results of the whole campaign describe an Anglo-Saxon minster, thought to go back to the ninth century and destroyed at some point between 1019 and 1051. Pottery and a millstone of the late ninth to early eleventh century belong with that minster.

A gilded gold page-turner of the eighth or ninth century, of the kind a monk would have used, was found and taken as evidence of the minster in the 800s. A very rare silver penny of Coenwulf, who ruled from 796 to 821, came out of the same ground, and so did a silver halfpenny of Edgar, called the Peaceable, who ruled from 959 to 975 and was the great-great-grandson of Alfred the Great. A small bronze bracelet of Viking type may have been traded from Dublin in the 900s. A possible nunnery seems to have formed part of the minster.

Its chapel, on the evidence used by the excavators, lay beside the place where two burials were uncovered.

The first castle was a motte and bailey. William FitzOsbern, first Earl of Hereford, is credited with it. One account puts the work at about 1067, another at about 1070, and a third simply says shortly after the Norman Conquest of 1066. FitzOsbern was born about 1011 and died on 22 February 1071.

He was a relative and close counsellor of William the Conqueror, and one of the few men who can be shown to have fought beside him at Hastings in 1066. His father, Osbern the Steward, was a nephew of Duchess Gunnor and a guardian of the young Duke William. FitzOsbern himself was probably raised at the ducal court, became a steward like his father, and married Adeliza de Tosny, probably about 1030. Together they founded Lyre Abbey and later Cormeilles Abbey, and he also founded Saint-Evroul.

He was an early and vigorous advocate of the invasion of England. Tradition says that at the Council of Lillebonne he persuaded Norman barons who doubted the plan. His younger brother was one of Edward the Confessor’s chaplains and held the church at Bosham, where Harold appears at the opening of the Bayeux Tapestry, so the family was well placed to hear news from England.

After the conquest, FitzOsbern was made Earl of Hereford in 1067, one of the first earldoms in England. His lands lay especially in Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Oxfordshire, and the Isle of Wight, with smaller holdings in Berkshire, Dorset, Wiltshire, and Worcestershire. In the summer of 1067, when King William went back to Normandy, he left England in the charge of Bishop Odo of Bayeux and FitzOsbern. The king returned in 1068, and FitzOsbern went with him into the south-west.

He was also sent toward York in 1069 during the unrest there, and he is likely to have had a large part in crushing the rising of Eadric the Wild in the west midlands, which had Welsh allies. From that fighting, he and his men pushed into Wales and began the Norman takeover of the kingdom of Gwent. Castle-building was how that takeover was held. Castles attributed to him include Carisbrooke on the Isle of Wight, his chief residence, Chepstow, Snodhill, Wigmore, Clifford, Monmouth, and Berkeley, besides works at Hereford and Shrewsbury.

Berkeley was one of the March castles, raised to keep the Welsh out. The land around it could be flooded for defence. In 1070, trouble in Flanders drew him away. Count Baldwin VI had died, and the widow Richilde offered him marriage and the county.

He hurried there with an army, was defeated, and was killed at the Battle of Cassel on 22 February 1071. His son Roger de Breteuil succeeded him in England and Wales.

The first Berkeley family then held the castle for three generations, each man named Roger de Berkeley. They rebuilt it in the first half of the twelfth century. Another account says the rebuild was the work of the last Roger and his father. In 1152 that last Roger was dispossessed.

He had held the fee-farm of Berkeley from King Stephen, and he withheld his allegiance from the House of Plantagenet during the war known as the Anarchy. Plantagenet forces took the fee-farm. The lands included Berkeley itself, Filton, Horfield, Almondsbury, and Ashleworth, and possessions in Gwent and Glamorgan. Roger was left with a reduced barony based on Dursley.

The archives of the later family do not hold the records of those Berkeleys of Dursley.

The Anarchy was the civil war in England and Normandy, dated from 1138 to 1153, that followed the wreck of the White Ship in 1120. Henry I’s only legitimate son, William Adelin, drowned. Henry tried to leave the throne to his daughter, the Empress Matilda, and made his barons swear to her, but when he died in 1135 his nephew Stephen of Blois took the crown with the help of his brother Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester. Stephen and Matilda were first cousins, both grandchildren of William the Conqueror.

Matilda had been the wife of the Emperor Henry V, and after his death she married Geoffrey Plantagenet, count of Anjou, a man the Norman lords disliked. Neither side could finish the war. Castles were easy to hold, so the fighting was mostly sieges, raids, and skirmishes, often with mercenaries. In 1139 Matilda invaded with the help of her half-brother Robert, Earl of Gloucester, and Bristol Castle was held for the Plantagenet cause.

Stephen was captured at Lincoln in 1141 and later exchanged. Matilda went back to Normandy in 1148 and left the English campaign to her son Henry FitzEmpress, the future Henry II. In 1153 Henry invaded. The armies faced each other at Wallingford and did not fight a pitched battle.

The Treaty of Wallingford left Stephen as king and recognised Henry as his heir. Stephen died in 1154, and Henry became the first Angevin king of England.

The man who received Berkeley was Robert Fitzharding, born about 1095 and dead in 1170. He was a wealthy burgess and merchant of Bristol, and a financier of the future Henry II while Matilda was challenging Stephen. He is described as one of the very few Anglo-Saxon noblemen who kept noble rank under Norman rule and joined the Norman nobility. He is believed to have been the grandson of Eadnoth, who was staller under Edward the Confessor and under Harold.

His father, Harding of Bristol, was the king’s reeve in the town and had a house in Baldwin Street. Robert later built a large house in Broad Street, on the River Frome. He bought from Robert, Earl of Gloucester, a wide stretch of land south and west of Bristol, including Redcliffe, Bedminster, Leigh, Portbury, and Billeswick. In 1140 he founded St Augustine’s Abbey, a house of Victorine Augustinians, at Billeswick, just across the Frome from Bristol Castle.

He endowed it with lands and with church revenues. In 1148 he chose Richard of Warwick as the first abbot. Henry II added endowments in 1155, and in 1159 Fitzharding confirmed his own gifts by charter. The abbey built a church, a chapter house, and a great gatehouse in his lifetime.

After the Reformation the abbey church became Bristol Cathedral. Many of the Berkeley family were buried there, and some of their effigies remain. A nineteenth-century window in the cathedral shows Fitzharding and his wife with Henry II.

In 1153 or 1154 Fitzharding received a royal charter from Henry II allowing him to rebuild Berkeley Castle. Another account dates the grant of the castle to 1156. After Henry was crowned, Fitzharding was rewarded with a feudal barony made out of lands Roger de Berkeley had held from Stephen, and the castle became the head of that barony. He made further gifts to St Augustine’s from those lands.

Henry had regretted the damage done by dispossessing Roger, and he pressed the two families to join. In 1153 or 1154 Fitzharding’s heir, Maurice, born about 1120 and also called Maurice de Berkeley, married Alice, the eldest daughter of the dispossessed Roger, who was now the baron of Dursley. At the same time Fitzharding’s daughter Helen married Roger’s heir, another Roger. The double contract was signed at Fitzharding’s house in Bristol, with Duke Henry present and sixteen witnesses.

Fitzharding built the circular shell keep between 1153 and 1156, probably on the site of the old motte. The curtain wall followed, probably between 1160 and 1190, begun by Robert and continued by his son Maurice. The wall on the east and south, including the walls of the Great Hall, belongs to that campaign, and the south-west was altered in the fourteenth century. The base of a circular keep from the time of FitzOsbern is also said to remain.

Before he died, Fitzharding became a canon of the abbey he had founded. A verse written in the thirteenth century places Dermot MacMurrough, the exiled king of Leinster, as a guest in Fitzharding’s house in Bristol, and has Fitzharding carrying messages between Dermot and Henry II while Dermot looked for Norman help to recover Leinster. Fitzharding’s wife Eva has no certain ancestry. She founded the Augustinian nunnery of St Mary Magdalen on St Michael’s Hill in Bristol, endowed it with lands in Southmead, and was its first abbess.

She was buried beside her husband in the choir of St Augustine’s. Fitzharding also held the ground at Beverston where his grandson Maurice de Gaunt later completed a castle in 1229. The family that still owns Berkeley traces itself to Robert and Eva. The castle’s own account says the family is the only English family still in existence in England that can follow its line from father to son back to Saxon times.

The archives now in the castle begin in 1154. They have been described as older than the castle itself, which can sit beside the fact that a motte already stood there in the eleventh century and that the shell keep was raised in the 1150s. The documents are mostly title deeds and manorial accounts. There are no personal records of the family in the muniment room.

One count of the collection is about 25,000 documents, of which about 6,000 date from before 1490. Another count, used when the excavations were planned, is about 20,000 documents, of which about 6,000 belong to the medieval period. Everything from before 1492 has been catalogued. That year is given as the moment the castle passed into royal hands for more than sixty years.

The finished castle was a house as well as a fortress. Trip steps were made to throw an attacker off balance. There are arrow slits, murder holes, huge barred doors, the slots where a portcullis once dropped, and stones worn where sentries stood. Much of what a visitor sees beyond the keep is fourteenth-century work for Thomas de Berkeley, third Baron Berkeley, known as The Rich.

That epithet, like the epithets of the other heads of the family, was coined by John Smyth of Nibley, who died in 1641. Smyth was steward of the Berkeley estates and wrote the lives of the family from the eleventh century to the early seventeenth. Thomas was born about 1293 or 1296 and died on 27 October 1361. He was the eldest son of Maurice de Berkeley, second Baron Berkeley, and Eva la Zouche.

He was imprisoned with his father and his younger brother Maurice after the failure of the baronial revolt against Edward II, and he was released in late 1326, probably because his father-in-law was Roger Mortimer. In May 1319 he had married Margaret, daughter of Roger Mortimer and Joan de Geneville. She died on 5 May 1337. Their children included Maurice, who became the fourth baron, another Thomas, a Roger, and Joan.

Thomas inherited the castle in 1326 and began to beautify it. Thorpe’s Tower, north of the keep, the inner gatehouse to the south-west, and other buildings of the inner bailey are his. A progressive remodelling of the living rooms began about 1340, certainly in the inner bailey and perhaps in the outer bailey as well. The buildings that had stood in the outer bailey were cleared in the seventeenth century.

The Great Hall was given a new roof in the fourteenth century. The work of 1340 to 1350 survives in the inner bailey. In June 1347 Thomas married again, Katherine, daughter of Sir John Clevedon and widow of Sir Peter Veel. He died in 1361 and was buried at Berkeley beside her.

The event that fixed Berkeley in national history was the imprisonment and reported death of Edward II. Edward was born on 25 April 1284 at Caernarfon and was king of England from 1307 until he was removed in January 1327. He was the fourth son of Edward I, and he became heir when his elder brother Alphonso died. He was knighted in 1306 at Westminster in the great ceremony called the Feast of the Swans, and he succeeded his father the next year.

In 1308 he married Isabella, daughter of Philip IV of France, at Boulogne on 25 January. She was about twelve. Their coronation was at Westminster on 25 February. Their son, the future Edward III, was born in 1312, and John, Eleanor, and Joan followed.

Edward came to the throne with his father’s unfinished war in Scotland, with the awkward duty of homage to the French king for Gascony, and with debts. His reliance on favourites split him from his barons. Piers Gaveston was exiled, recalled, captured, and killed in 1312. The defeat at Bannockburn in 1314 left the king weaker still.

John Maltravers, later one of Edward’s keepers at Berkeley, is said to have been taken prisoner in that battle. He had been knighted with the prince on 22 May 1306.

Hugh Despenser the Younger then became the man closest to the king. He was born about 1287 or 1289, knighted at the same Feast of the Swans, and married Eleanor de Clare. When her brother Gilbert was killed at Bannockburn, Eleanor became a co-heiress of the Gloucester earldom, and Hugh gained Glamorgan. By 1318 he was chamberlain of the household.

He was granted Wallingford Castle, which Isabella had held for life. The Marcher lords, among them Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, raided his Welsh lands. In 1321 Thomas of Lancaster and the barons forced the Despensers into exile. Isabella’s party was refused entry at Leeds Castle by Margaret de Clare, wife of Bartholomew de Badlesmere, and the fight outside the gate gave Edward a reason to strike back.

He recalled the Despensers, crushed the revolt, and executed Lancaster. Mortimer surrendered at Shrewsbury in 1322 after attacking and burning Bridgnorth. A death sentence on him was commuted to life imprisonment in the Tower of London. On 1 August 1323 he escaped, reached France, and was condemned in his absence.

Maltravers had been in arms against the king in 1322, was at Boroughbridge, and went overseas. Thomas de Berkeley stayed in prison until late 1326.

Isabella went to France in 1325 to negotiate with her brother Charles IV after he had seized Edward’s French possessions. Her lands in England had been taken, her household arrested, and her children removed. She refused to come home while the Despensers stayed in power. By early 1326 she was linked with Mortimer.

They betrothed her son to Philippa, daughter of William, count of Hainaut, and with the dowry and a loan they raised a mercenary force and ships. Estimates of the army that sailed run from about 300 to about 2,000, with 1,500 often given as a middle figure. They landed at Orwell on 24 September 1326. Edward had ordered about 2,000 men to meet an invasion there, and only about 55 seem to have arrived.

The local levies changed sides. Henry of Lancaster, brother of the executed Thomas, and the king’s half-brother Thomas of Brotherton joined the queen. Edward left London on 2 October. The city turned on his officers.

Walter Stapledon, the former treasurer, was killed. Edward reached Gloucester between 9 and 12 October and tried to cross to Ireland from Chepstow, but the weather drove him back. Hugh Despenser the Elder was taken at Bristol and executed on 27 October. Edward and the younger Despenser were captured on 16 November near Llantrisant, or, in another telling, north of Caerphilly.

The younger Despenser was tried at Hereford on 24 November 1326 and hanged, drawn, and quartered.

There was no settled way to remove a king. A parliament at Westminster in January 1327, which Edward refused to attend, agreed that he should be replaced by his son. On 20 January, at Kenilworth, he was told that if he did not resign, his son might be set aside as well. He agreed, in tears.

On 21 January Sir William Trussell withdrew homage. The coronation of Edward III was at Westminster on 1 February 1327. Isabella was regent in practice, and Mortimer was the real ruler beside her. Lawyers of the time still said the deposition stood on doubtful ground, and Edward was known to be a man who took revenge.

Plots to free him began at once.

Mortimer moved him from Kenilworth to Berkeley as a safer prison. He arrived about 5 April 1327. Custody was joint between Thomas de Berkeley, Mortimer’s son-in-law, and John Maltravers, Thomas’s brother-in-law. They were allowed five pounds a day for his maintenance.

Luxury goods were bought for him, but some chroniclers say he was often mistreated. A poem called the Lament of Edward II has been attributed to him in prison, and that attribution is disputed. A band of his supporters broke into the castle and got him out, and he was recaptured soon afterwards. One attempt at least reached the prison inside the castle.

He may then have been moved in secret among several castles and brought back to Berkeley in September, or in the late summer. Some writers have argued that the escape succeeded and that another man was killed in his place.

On 23 September 1327 Edward III was told that his father had died at Berkeley during the night of 21 September. The message to the queen and the young king called it a fatal accident. Most historians take the view that Edward did die at Berkeley that night, even though the evidence is a letter later disputed by the man who was said to have sent it. Mark Ormrod called the death suspiciously timely, because it removed Mortimer’s chief danger.

Most historians think Edward was probably murdered on the orders of the new regime, and it is impossible to be certain. If he died of natural causes, depression in captivity may have hastened it. Adam Murimuth says Edward was killed by order of Maltravers and Thomas Gurney, whose name is also written Gournay and Gourney, but later scholars doubt that charge. Thomas de Berkeley’s own account, given at his trial, was that he had been ordered to hand the castle over to Maltravers and Sir Thomas Gournay, that he left with a heavy heart because he saw what violence was intended, and that he went to his manor of Bradley.

The king, on that account, was almost certainly murdered while Thomas was away. The castle’s history gives the same defence in another form: the killing was the work of Mortimer’s agents during Thomas’s absence. John Smyth doubted the story. Modern historians have accepted those doubts, and it remains possible that the story was true.

The year of the reckoning is given both as 1330, when Thomas spoke in parliament and denied having sent the letter that announced the death, and as 1337, when he was cleared of all charges. He was acquitted, spent the next decade under a cloud, and was restored to favour in the 1340s. Maltravers and Berkeley are also said to have remained in charge of the body until the burial at Gloucester on 21 October.

The manner of the killing became a story of its own. A chronicle printed in 1587 says the killers came at night into the room where Edward lay asleep, held him down with heavy feather beds or a table, and forced a horn, or the pipe of a trumpet, into his body so that a red-hot spit or a plumber’s iron could be pushed through it. The point of that tale is that no outward wound would show. His cry was said to have woken people in the castle and in the town.

Leading up to this, the same account says his keepers lodged him in a chamber over a foul dungeon full of dead carrion, hoping the stench would kill him, and that he survived it. Most historians now dismiss the red-hot iron. They doubt that captors who wanted a secret death would have chosen a method so easy to detect, and the story has no strong contemporary support. It spread from the mid-1330s and the 1340s, and Geoffrey le Baker later gave a highly coloured version.

It was often tied to claims about Edward’s sexual life. Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan playwright baptised on 26 February 1564 and dead on 30 May 1593, wrote a tragedy of Edward II that was first published in 1594 and stages the killing at Berkeley Castle with the instruments named in that later chronicle. The room said to be the cell can still be seen, and next to it a dungeon about eleven metres, or thirty-six feet, deep. Castle tradition says the dungeon echoes the killing every year on 21 September.

A second argument says Edward did not die in 1327 at all. The Fieschi letter, written in the 1340s by an Italian priest, Manuel Fieschi, and sent to Edward III, claims that Edward escaped Berkeley with a servant and lived on as a hermit in the Holy Roman Empire. In that letter the body buried at Gloucester is the castle porter, killed and passed off as the king. The letter is often linked to a meeting in 1338 at Antwerp between Edward III and a man called William the Welshman, who said he was Edward II.

Some parts of the letter are treated as broadly accurate, and other parts as implausible. Paul Doherty has argued that Edward escaped with the help of a knight, William Ockle, also written Ockley, and that a look-alike was buried at Gloucester. Ian Mortimer has argued that Roger Mortimer staged a false escape, kept Edward in Ireland, and faked the death, a fiction Edward III later maintained. Alison Weir has argued that Edward escaped, killed one of his captors, and lived as a hermit, so that the body at Gloucester is the captor’s.

David Carpenter has answered that there is no convincing evidence that Edward survived, and none that a Mortimer plot produced a false death. Several men suspected of a hand in the death, including Gurney, Maltravers, and Ockley, later fled.

The body was embalmed at Berkeley and lay there for a month. Local leaders from Bristol and Gloucester viewed it. It lay in the chapel of Saint John inside the keep. Thomas de Berkeley then escorted it to Gloucester Abbey, where it arrived on 21 October.

Edward was buried by the high altar on 20 December, the funeral probably delayed so that Edward III could be there. The cost was £351, with gilt lions and standards painted in gold leaf. A temporary wooden effigy with a copper crown was made, the first known funeral effigy in England, probably because the body had been dead for three months. The heart was placed in a silver container and later buried with Isabella at Newgate Church in London.

The tomb, with an early English alabaster effigy, still stands in what is now Gloucester Cathedral. It was opened in 1855 and restored in 2007 and 2008 at a cost of more than £100,000. Visitors came in such numbers that the abbey could rebuild much of the church in the 1330s. Richard II backed an attempt to have Edward canonised in 1395, and it failed.

Isabella and Mortimer did not rule for long after the death was announced. The peace they made with the Scots was deeply unpopular. In March 1330 Mortimer had Edmund of Woodstock, Earl of Kent, Edward’s half-brother, executed. In October 1330, just before Edward III turned eighteen, the king and his companions entered Nottingham Castle by an underground passage and seized Mortimer.

Isabella was heard to say, “Fair son, have pity on the gentle Mortimer.” He was condemned without trial and hanged at Tyburn on 29 November 1330. One of the charges was the murder of Edward II. His body hung for two days. Isabella was held and soon released, and she lived until 22 August 1358 as a wealthy courtier.

Among the fourteen charges against Mortimer, the killing at Berkeley was the one that mattered most to the new king’s story of his father’s reign. Edward III’s government blamed Mortimer for the ills of the previous years and, in doing so, repaired Edward II’s reputation.

Maltravers had come back with Isabella and Mortimer in October 1326 and received a grant out of Despenser lands. On 3 April 1327 he was named a keeper of the deposed king. He was later involved in the destruction of the Earl of Kent, was condemned to death in the parliament of November 1330, and escaped to Germany. He made a fortune in Flanders and lost it.

In 1345 he met Edward III at the mouth of the Scheldt and asked to come home, saying he had been condemned unheard. Full restoration of his honour and lands came on 8 February 1352. He died on 16 February 1364. His first wife was Millicent de Berkeley, sister of Thomas.

Through that marriage the later barony of Maltravers passed into the Fitzalan family and then to the dukes of Norfolk.

Berkeley Castle went on being altered by the same family. In 1384 Katharine, Lady Berkeley, founded Katharine Lady Berkeley’s School. A small, fully endowed school was unusual, and she was one of the first people in England to found one. In the Great Hall, Dickie Pearce, called the last court jester in England, died after falling from the minstrels’ gallery.

His tomb is in the churchyard of Saint Mary, next to the castle. Beside the hall, the chapel of Saint Mary, now the Morning Room, has a painted wooden vault and a biblical passage written in Norman French. A thirteenth-century horse-harness pendant of a nobleman called De Monthiemer, also spelled De Montiemer, was later found in the excavations and shown in the castle. The digs also found the remains of two fishponds and a building that may belong to the hospital of the Holy Trinity, dated about 1170 to 1547, the vanished line of Saint Michael’s Lane, two Tudor houses that appear on a map of 1544, and the castle’s medieval barn.

A quarrel over who should inherit the castle and the Berkeley lands led to the Battle of Nibley Green, fought near North Nibley on 20 March 1470. It is remembered as the last battle in England fought entirely between the private armies of feudal lords. Thomas Talbot, second Viscount Lisle, was heir-general of Thomas de Berkeley, fifth Baron Berkeley. William Berkeley, second Baron Berkeley, was heir-male.

Lisle challenged William to fight the next day. Lisle could raise only a small force of poorly equipped local tenants, about 300 men. William had the castle garrison, his own levies, men brought by his brother Maurice, and miners from the Forest of Dean, about 1,000 in all. Philip Mede of Wraxall, several times mayor of Bristol, sent men to the Berkeley side.

Maurice had married Philip’s daughter Isabel, and William had disinherited him for marrying below his rank. Lisle charged as William’s men came out of a wood. Berkeley archers broke the charge. An archer from the Forest of Dean, known as Black Will, shot Lisle in the left temple through an open visor and pulled him from his horse.

Further dagger blows killed him. His men fled. William went on to Lisle’s manor at Wotton-under-Edge and sacked it.

In 1492 the castle passed to the crown and stayed in royal hands for more than sixty years. James Lees-Milne, the writer and historian of country houses, recorded in 1965 that the family holding was broken by a period of royal ownership under the Tudors. Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn visited Berkeley in August 1535, after staying at Gloucester. Anne had been queen since 1533, as Henry’s second wife, and she was beheaded for treason on 19 May 1536.

The visit therefore fell while she was still queen and while, on the archive dating, the crown still held the castle. In the late sixteenth century Elizabeth I came and played bowls on the castle bowling green, so the family was back in possession by then. An illuminated prayer book of the early fifteenth century, the Neville Hours, once belonged to George Neville, Baron Bergavenny, a distant connection of the family, and was bought by the eighth earl in 1932. Its pictures include Saint Christopher, and Saint George with the dragon.

In the First English Civil War the castle was held for the king. In 1645 a Parliamentarian force under Colonel Thomas Rainsborough took it after a short siege. Cannon were fired at point-blank range from the roof of the church of Saint Mary the Virgin, next to the castle. The garrison surrendered.

As was usual, the walls were left breached. The family was allowed to keep the castle on condition that they never repair the damage to the keep and the outer bailey. The breach was later partly filled by a low garden wall, enough to stop a fall of twenty-eight feet from the Keep Garden, which occupies the old motte. Excavation has shown that a ditch between the outer ward and Saint Mary’s church was a defensive work of about 1645, not the medieval moat it had been taken for.

Some buildings were forcibly destroyed at that time. Between 1748 and 1753 the tower of Saint Mary’s was taken down and rebuilt beside the church so that it would not stand in the line of fire from the castle. In the early eighteenth century the fourth Earl of Berkeley planted a pine that was reputed to have been grown from a cutting taken from a tree at the Battle of Culloden.

Changes stayed modest until the early nineteenth century. Mary, wife of the fifth earl, was the daughter of a Gloucestershire tradesman and had been the earl’s mistress for ten years before they married in 1796. She seems to have driven a building campaign of 1805 to 1807, when a Gothic block was put up against Thorpe’s Tower. The kennels of the Berkeley Hunt in the park were probably built then.

A long quiet period followed. In 1882 the barony of Berkeley separated from the earldom. In 1916 the earldom and the castle passed to Randal Thomas Mowbray Berkeley, 8th Earl of Berkeley, a peer, a physical chemist, and a landowner, who was born on 31 January 1865 and died on 15 January 1942. He was the eighth and last earl.

He sold his London estate for two million pounds and set out to make Berkeley a perfect medieval picture, even where that meant changing the authentic fabric. Real features were removed or altered. A screen and a fireplace were brought in from elsewhere. A new porch was added in the same Gothic manner as the rest of the building.

The private rooms were modernised, including an American bathroom. The gardens took their present form in his time. The terraces of the gardens belong to a longer stretch, from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, and they sit beside the Home Park, with Whitcliff deer park about a kilometre to the south-west.

He left the castle to his thirteenth cousin, Captain Robert Berkeley (cricketer), of Spetchley Park in Worcestershire. Robert George Wilmot Berkeley was born on 23 April 1898 and died on 28 August 1969. He was High Sheriff of Worcestershire in 1933 and 1934, a deputy lieutenant of that county from 1952, and he played first-class cricket for Worcestershire before he inherited Berkeley in 1942. His grandson Charles Berkeley, born in 1968, High Sheriff of Gloucestershire for 2019 and 2020, inherited the castle and the estate from his father, Major John Berkeley, who lived from 1931 to 2017.

Since 1956 the castle has been open to visitors for a fee. In 2023 the open season ran from April to November on certain days of the week. The house can also be rented for private events. In 2006 an appeal was launched for the £5.5 million said to be needed to repair the Norman building.

In 2022 a grant was used to renovate the Education Room. Inside, the Godwin Cup dates from the Tudor period. A set of gilded furniture was embroidered by Elizabeth, Countess of Berkeley. Two military banners hang in the Great Hall.

An antique four-poster has been identified as the piece of furniture kept in continuous use for the longest time in Great Britain by the same family.

In 2017 the American actress Courteney Cox came to the castle for a genealogy programme and was told that she is a direct descendant, twenty-one generations on, of Thomas de Berkeley, the third baron, and twenty-two generations on of his father-in-law Roger Mortimer. The castle and its grounds have also been used for filming, including scenes of a 2003 television film of The Other Boleyn Girl, exterior shots for Galavant, and both interior and exterior work for the second season of The Spanish Princess in 2019. Two ships of the Royal Navy have carried the name Berkeley Castle, after the earls, and so has a Great Western Railway locomotive of the 4073 class.

The estate today covers about 6,000 acres. It includes what the castle describes as one of the best surviving medieval deer parks in the country, eighteen tenant farms, a stretch of the Severn, and the land on which the wildfowl collection at Slimbridge stands. The family, the building, the contents, the estate, and the town have lasted together for more than nine centuries. For much of that time the Berkeleys were close to the throne, administrators and fighters who stayed with a king or a queen while they could, and who married carefully.

The price of that closeness, in 1327, was that a deposed king was brought through their gate and did not, on the account given to his son, leave alive.

The excavations that began in 2005 were set up in 2003, when the castle offered a long research partnership because development and conservation were being considered in the town. Mick Aston, Mark Horton, and Stuart Prior made the first visit. Students, school pupils, and local volunteers dug until the summer of 2019. The aim was to join the finds to the medieval documents.

In 2016 the project was named Archaeology Project of the Year. The final season was filmed for a television archaeology series, with Alice Roberts present. A book of the work, edited by Stuart Prior, Mark Horton, and Konstantinos Trimmis, was published in 2023. Horton, who led the early seasons, said the prehistoric material was unexpected.

Prior said the digging had shown a Roman beginning, an Anglo-Saxon minster, Norman castle-building, a small medieval town, a part in the Civil War, and the forced destruction of some buildings. More than a thousand artefacts were recorded over the first decade alone. What the ground added, beyond the family story, was the religious house the Normans built over, the hospital and the Tudor street that vanished, and the proof that the ditch by the church belongs to 1645 rather than to the age of the shell keep.