The Screams of Berkeley

Berkeley Castle has stood above the Severn vale for nearly nine hundred years. It is still lived in, which is rarer than it sounds. Its walls are a soft pink-grey sandstone, and on a summer afternoon the place looks almost gentle.

It does not look gentle in September.

In the spring of 1327, a king arrived at Berkeley as a prisoner. Edward II had been forced from his throne that January by his own queen, Isabella, and her ally Roger Mortimer. His reign had been a long run of disasters: defeat by the Scots at Bannockburn, quarrels with his barons, and a devotion to favourites that made him enemies at every level of the realm. Now his young son wore the crown as Edward III, and the old king was an inconvenience.

He was moved from castle to castle, and in April he came to Berkeley. There were attempts to free him. They failed.

Tradition says he was kept in a cell in the keep, close above a deep pit where the castle’s dead animals were thrown, in the hope that the stench and the damp would finish him without anyone having to lift a hand. They did not. Edward was stronger than his gaolers had bargained for.

On 21 September 1327, the feast of St Matthew, the former king died at Berkeley. The official word was that he had died naturally. Almost nobody believed it.

What happened in the keep that night has been argued over for seven centuries, and the chroniclers who wrote it down years later did not always agree. But one part of the story was told again and again, and it is the part that has never left the castle.

They say he screamed.

The chroniclers wrote that his cries were heard far beyond the walls: across the courtyard, out over the town, down to the meadows by the river. Men and women in their beds in Berkeley woke in the dark and lay listening. Some, it was said, prayed for the soul that was leaving the world in such agony. Some knew, or guessed, exactly whose voice it was.

The lord of the castle, Thomas de Berkeley, later told Parliament that he had been away from Berkeley at the time, lying ill elsewhere, and knew nothing of the death until afterwards. He was cleared. Two of the king’s keepers were not so fortunate. They fled abroad, and one of them died on the way home under guard.

Edward was buried at St Peter’s Abbey in Gloucester, now Gloucester Cathedral. His tomb, with its alabaster effigy, became a place of pilgrimage, and the offerings left there helped pay for the rebuilding of the abbey church. A murdered king made a better saint than a living one.

There is one more twist. In the 1330s, an Italian priest called Manuele Fieschi wrote a letter to Edward III claiming that his father had escaped Berkeley alive and lived out his days as a hermit in Italy. Historians still debate it. If he did escape, then somebody else lies in Gloucester, and the screams belonged to someone history never named.

But Berkeley has made up its mind.

On the anniversary of the king’s death, so the story goes, the screams come back. They rise from the keep on the night of 21 September and carry out over the town as they did in 1327. Some who have kept watch on that night swear they have heard them. Others hear nothing at all, and go home disappointed.

The cell is still there. So is the pit.

If you find yourself in Berkeley on a September night, with the town quiet and the castle a black shape against the sky, it might be worth leaving the window open. Just a little.

Just in case.