Berrick Salome /ˈbɛrɪk ˈsæləm/ is a village and civil parish in South Oxfordshire, England, about 3 miles (5 km) north of Wallingford. Since the 1992 boundary changes, the parish has included the whole of Roke and Rokemarsh (previously largely in the parish of Benson) and Berrick Prior (previously part of the parish of Newington). The 2011 Census recorded the parish's population as 326. In 1965, Reginald Ernest Moreau (1897–1970), an eminent ornithologist, and a Berrick Salome resident from 1947, realized that he could build up a picture of the village as it had been in the decades before the First World War, based on the recollections of elderly villagers. His study, which was published in 1968 as The Departed Village: Berrick Salome at the Turn of the Century, also included an introduction to local history. This provided much of the information for "A Village History" which appeared in The Berrick and Roke Millennium Book and is the major source for this article.

Berewic is Old English for "barley farm" and Salome is from the surname "Sulham". In the 13th century, Aymar de Sulham held the manor. There is a Britwell Salome about 3 miles (5 km) to the east, and Sulham is a parish in Berkshire near Reading. Prior: Berrick Prior is the corn farm belonging to the Prior of Canterbury (see below: 'Middle Ages'). Liam Tiller gives early versions of the name as Berewiche (1086) and Berewick (1210, 1258). Moreau quotes later versions found in The Place-names of Oxfordshire, as Berrick Sullame (1571), Berwick Sallome (1737, 1797), and, by the time of the 1863 inclosure award, Berrick Salome. In fact, the modern spelling can be found much earlier: the 1830 OS one inch map, reproduced in Ditmas, shows Berwick Salome, though in a smaller typeface than Berwick Prior.

Berrick seems to have been first settled because it had a reliable source of water. Springs rise to the north-east of the parish at the junction of the Upper Greensand and Gault clay. The most significant of these springs rises near Grove Barn, and is the source of the brook which enters the village along Hollandtide Bottom and flows, culverted in places, past the village pond (which it does not feed) before turning south to run under the forecourt of the Chequers Inn, under the road and across fields, passing east of Lower Berrick Farm and then turning west toward the Thames. Until the mains water was connected in the village, people in the northern part of Berrick drew their water from this brook, outside what is now the Chequers car park, leaning over a railing to scoop the water using what Moreau refers to as a "big dipper" which was kept on the bank there. He also notes that, as late as the 1960s, a resident of Berrick Littleworth could be seen crossing Back Street to draw water from a roadside brook flowing from Hillpit Spring.

Saint Helen's parish church is about 440 yards (400 m) east of the Chequers, well away from any houses, and at the dead end of a lane which is the surviving part of Keame's Hedge Way, an ancient track closed in the 19th century as part of the inclosure process, which joined the east–west route along Hollandtide Bottom just north of the church. Christine Holmes, in Benson: A Village Through its History identifies a "straight Roman road running east from Dorchester along which the churches of Shirburn, Pyrton, Cuxham, Brightwell Baldwin, Berrick Salome and Warborough all lie". This road would have run through Hollandtide Bottom from Berrick to Brightwell. It has been suggested that, when St Helen's was built, there may have been houses grouped around the church, and that the village centre may have moved later to the junction where the track along Hollandtide Bottom meets routes to Chalgrove, Newington, Warborough, and Benson.

It is uncertain when the church was first established in Berrick but the fact that it is dedicated to Saint Helen suggests that it may have been founded (or refounded) in the late eighth century when King Offa of Mercia recaptured the Benson area from Wessex. Holmes writes "St. Helen – an unusual dedication for Oxfordshire but allegedly a favourite of Offa". Apart from Berrick and Benson churches, there is only one in the county dedicated to St Helen, at Albury (near Thame). There is a view, not universally accepted, that parts of the present building, and, in particular, the font, predate the Norman Conquest of England. The font has interlacing ornament of a style originating in Northumbria in the early days of English Christianity. The architectural historians, Jennifer Sherwood and Nikolaus Pevsner describe the font as Norman, while Liam Tiller comments, "It is surprising that such a high quality font should be found in such a small rural chapel", and suggests that it may have been brought to Berrick from a larger church, perhaps Chalgrove, at a later date. Also, Moreau observes that Berrick church is not included in the Taylors' comprehensive work on Anglo-Saxon architecture.

Saint Helen's, Berrick has long been a chapelry of St Mary's, Chalgrove, and identical lists of incumbents displayed in both churches show that, at least from the 11th century, the two parishes have always had the same priest, although they have had no common boundary since Berrick Prior was transferred to Newington parish in the reign of King Canute (as explained below). Moreau drew attention to another ecclesiastical oddity in the relationship; the incumbent is Vicar of Chalgrove but Rector of Berrick. He/she lives in the vicarage in Chalgrove, more than 2 miles (3 km) from Berrick church, and has no rectory in Berrick. The arrangement of boundaries (See below: '18th and 19th centuries') seems to have caused some uncertainty about parish responsibilities so that, in the middle of the 19th century, "Berrick Salome and Roke had been linked under the ministry of an assistant curate from Benson". At that time, as will be seen below, most of the houses in Roke, but only two in Berrick, fell within Benson parish, and in the same period, as Moreau records, there was an unusual protest against the 'discontinuance and stopping', under the inclosure award of 1853, of Keame's Hedge Way which provided a short cut for the residents of Roke going to Berrick church.

Also unusual is the story Moreau had from the Treasurer of Christ Church, Oxford, about the intervention, in 1853, by the vicar of Beckley, some 15 miles (24 km) away, who persuaded Christ Church to buy a plot of land to build a new church at Berrick Littleworth because "the present church at Berwick is very badly situated for the people at Berwick and very far from Roke". No new church for Berrick was built and control of the land, in Berrick parish, was given to the incumbent of Benson until it was sold over a century later. Perhaps the college preferred not to give control to the then Rector of Berrick, the radical Robert French Laurence, for fear that he would use the land to house the poor.

The church is 65 feet (20 m) long and the top of the tower is only about 3 feet (1 m) above the roof of the nave. In 1615, an earlier nave roof was replaced by "one of typical queen-post type with a complex timber truss". In 1676, a wooden gallery was added with dormer windows. "The circular stairway to the gallery at the west end of the central aisle appears to have blocked the doorway to the tower." As there were only 80 'conformists' in Berrick in 1676, the gallery probably provided accommodation for the church choir and band. The names of the churchwardens responsible for both these improvements are recorded on now-faded signs. Sherwood and Pevsner commend the medieval tiles found in the chancel as one of the more notable collections in the county, along with those at Nuffield and Somerton. Saint Helen's has a timber-framed tower, much like that at Drayton St Leonard where there is a "low west tower with a pyramid roof and entirely timber-framed, unusual in Oxfordshire." Waterperry also has a timber-framed tower while Lyford parish church has a wooden bell turret.