The window in the apartment beneath is similar in its general construction; but the columns which support the arch are somewhat higher, and a semicircular moulding of zigzag is carried beneath the arch; the middle part of the window, however, has been altered--a stone frame for glass having been inserted, of the style and age of Henry the Sixth, and probably in the time of the celebrated Earl Talbot, whom tradition represents as having his <g>own chamber</g> in this tower. In the second apartment is a fire-hearth, and, in an angle of the wall, a circular staircase leads to the upper story. “To this staircase is a most remarkable doorway; it has one large transom stone, as if to aid the arch to support the wall above, and in this respect it resembles several other Saxon structures, in which this singular fashion seems to have been uniformly adopted, until it became gradually altered by the introduction of a flattish _under-arch_, substituted in the room of the transom stone.”[191] <g>The principal entrance</g> was by a flight of steps on one side, distinct from the main building, and ascending to a platform before the doorway leading to the second chamber. The entrance to the dungeon, or lower apartment, was under “a very remarkable sort of pointed arch, formed of flat sides, which seems, from the appearance of the wall around it, and from its peculiar style, to have been inserted many ages after the tower was built, and in the time of <g>Edward</g> III.; a suspicion that appears to be most strongly confirmed, by the circumstance, that about the twenty-second year of Edward the Third, Richard Talbot, its then lord, obtained the royal license[192] for having in his castle a prison for male-factors, having also the cognizance of pleas of the crown, &c., within his lordship of Irchinfield. The bottom of the keep-tower would undoubtedly, as usual, be the place where such a prison would be established; and on that occasion it should seem that this new and strong door-frame was first constructed, whilst the very annexation of the lordship of Irchinfield, or Urchenfield, to the possession of this keep-tower, both of which his lordship appears to have been possessed of before this license was granted, shows the exceedingly high antiquity of this castle, since Urchenfield was, indeed, the very place where St. Dubricius founded his college of Religious, about A.D. 512, to live, like the original Eastern recluses, by the work of their own hands.”[193] The body of the keep is an exact square of twenty-nine feet.