Berkeley is a rare example of an estate which has descended in the male line from the reign of Stephen, and in the female line from the Norman Conquest. The first of the latter ancestry is entered as the Lord of Berkeley in Domesday; the first of the former is also there entered, though as proprietor of other estates. Few, if any, of our oldest families can say with truth as much, but further than this the Berkeley tenure has been “per Baroniam,” and from the Conquest they have been barons of the realm, first by tenure, and when, in the reign of Henry III., tenure fell into disuse, then by writ; but by one right or the other they have ever sat in the great council of the nation. There is no reason to suppose that the Romans had any settlement at Berkeley. Their camps and villas are frequent in the neighbourhood, which was traversed by Roman roads, but of their presence in Berkeley itself there is no other evidence than the fact that the two main streets of the town cross in its centre at a right angle, in the Roman manner. There is, however, evidence of a religious house at Berkeley in the eighth century. Tilhere, Bishop of Worcester, in 778, seems to have been previously Abbot of Beorclea, as was Etheldune, also his successor at Worcester in 915. Tanner thinks the family at Berclea, mentioned in the Acts of a synod at Cloveshoe in A.D. 824, may refer to a religious house here. There was also a nunnery, for a charter by Adeliza, queen of Henry I., gives to the church of Reading, Berkeley Hern, that is, the church of Berkeley, with its appended prebends, and the prebends “duarum monalium,” which seems to refer to a nunnery. Camden says the nunnery was suppressed by Earl Godwin in the reign of the Confessor, and preserves a scandalous tale thereupon, which derives some support from a curious entry in Domesday, whence it appears that Gytha, the wife of Godwin and mother of Harold, had Ullcestre, near Berkeley, from her husband, he having bought it from Azor that she might live there till she should live at Berkeley. “Nolebat enim de ipso manerio aliquid comedere pro destructione abbatiæ.”