Position of Berkeley.
The castle. the abode of Earl Godwine and the scene of the pious scruples of Gytha,[1] is now simply marked as a king's town;[2] the abbey had vanished in a past generation; the famous castle belongs to a later generation; but the place was not defenceless. Berkeley is indeed one of those places which have become strongholds almost by accident. It looks up at a crowd of points on the bold outlying promontories of the Cotswolds, points some of them marked by the earthworks of unrecorded times, which in Normandy or Maine could hardly fail to have been seized on for the site of fortresses far sooner than itself. Nor is it near enough to the wide estuary of the Severn to have been of any military importance in the way of commanding the stream. It is rather one of those places where the English lord fixed his dwelling on a spot which was chosen more as a convenient centre for his lands than with any regard to purposes of warfare. The mound, the church, the town, rose side by side on ground but slightly higher than the rich meadows around them. But the mound on which the great Earl of the West-Saxons had once dwelled had been, as usual, turned to Norman military uses. Earl William of Hereford, whose watchful care stretched on both sides of the river, had crowned it with what Domesday marks as "a little castle."[3] One would be well pleased to know in what such a defence was an advance on the palisades or other defences which may have surrounded the hall of Godwine. In after days
- [Footnote: Florence more fully; "Willelmus de Owe Glawornensem invadit comitatum,
regiam villam deprædatur Beorchelaum, per totam ferro et flamma grande perpetrat malum."]sunt v. hidæ pertinentes ad Berchelai quos W. comes misit extra ad faciendum unum castellulum."]
