Maltravers, who had the custody of the royal prisoner “month about.” These men, taking advantage of the sickness of Berkeley, in whose custody the king then was, and while he was incapacitated from attending to his charge, entered the castle and took possession of the royal person. The very place where the act was committed is still preserved nearly intact; it is a detached and dismal chamber, then only lighted by arrow slits, situated over the steps which lead into the keep, and its appalling name of “The Dungeon Room,” is retained to this day. His murderers threw the king on his bed, and so perpetrated the murder as to avoid all external evidence of the cruel deed:-- “Mark the year and mark the night, When Severn shall re-echo with affright; The shrieks of death through Berkeley’s roofs that ring-- Shrieks of an agonising king!” “His crie,” writes Hollinshed, “did move many within the castell and town of Berkelei to compassion, plainelie hearing him utter a waileful noyse, as the tormentors were about to murder him; so that dyvers being awakened therebye (as they themselves confessed) prayed heartilie to God to receyve his soule, when they understode by his crie how the matter went.”[25] It is said that the monasteries of Bristol, Kingswood, and Malmesbury, refused to receive the body, which was ultimately buried at Gloucester, attended thereto, according to Fosbrooke, by the Berkeley family, his heart being put in a silver vessel.[26] Various additions were made to Berkeley Castle by subsequent lords. Thomas, the eighth lord, in 1342, rebuilt the high tower on the north side of the Keep (then in a state of decay), at a cost of 108_l._ 3_s._ 1½_d._; it was called “Thorpe’s Tower,” from the tenure of one Thorpe, who held his lands at Wanswell by the guard of it. “This lord also, at subsequent periods, built that portion beyond the keep on the north-east side, and gave to the castle its present shape and circumference.” The records of the castle exhibit many singular and striking evidences of the peculiar customs and manners of the several ages through which it has passed. In 1250 the lord of Berkeley feasted with fish during Lent the convent and abbey of Gloucester;[27] in 1273 marl was first used as manure on the lands of Berkeley, which then let for sixpence per acre. Thomas, the sixteenth earl, was much given to hunting;[28] in 1550 he had a princely residence in Shoe Lane (then a fashionable quarter), and used to hunt daily in Gray’s Inn Fields and about Islington. In 1572, on the occasion of Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Berkeley, “27 stagges were slaine in one day,” much to the displeasure of the earl, who “sodainely and passionately” desparked the ground. The visit was supposed to have been contrived by the Earl of Leicester, in order to provoke Lord Berkeley, and thus “draw upon him the royal disfavour.”