The custom of tolling the great bell to give notice of a fire still obtains in many villages of the North, the greater number of which have preserved their belfries in spite of the modifications they have undergone at different periods. The belfry tower usually contained a prison, a hall for the town-councillors, a muniment room, and a magazine for arms. It was long the only town-hall of a commune. [Illustration: 226. BELFRY AT CALAIS (FRANCE)] We shall find examples of these early municipal buildings among the isolated belfries of Belgium, such as that at Tournai, founded in 1187, and rebuilt in part at the close of the fourteenth century, and that of Ghent, the square tower of which dates from the end of the twelfth century. Its spire is a modern addition. A few buildings of this particular class still exist in France. Such is the belfry of Calais, the square tower of which was built during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is crowned by an octagonal superstructure, begun at the close of the fifteenth century, and completed in the early years of the seventeenth. The belfry of Béthune, which dates from the fourteenth century, is another. It consists of a square tower reinforced at three of its angles by a hexagonal turret, corbelled out from the wall. The fourth turret is of the same shape, but here the projection is carried up from the ground-floor, and contains the spiral staircase which communicates with the various stories of the tower, and terminates on the embattled parapet above. The building is completed by a pyramidal spire of great elegance, crowned by the watchman's tower. The plan and details of this superstructure proclaim it the source whence the gable turrets of Louvain were derived. The great bells hang in the uppermost story, the smaller ones of the carillon in the story below. On each façade at the summit of the tower a great dial marks the hours, as was customary from the fourteenth century onwards, when town-clocks first came into general use. The towns of Auxerre, Beaune, Amiens, Évreux, and Avignon still possess their belfries. To the belfry of Amiens, which dates from the thirteenth century, a square dome was added some hundred years ago. But the great bell of the fourteenth century has been preserved. [Illustration: 227. BELFRY OF BETHUNE (FRANCE)] [Illustration: 228. BELFRY OF ÉVREUX] The belfry of Évreux retains its fifteenth-century character almost in its entirety. That of Avignon, a monument of the close of the fifteenth century, was happily spared when the town-hall was replaced by a modern structure. [Illustration: 229. BELFRY OF AVIGNON]