Fires, frequent and disastrous, have destroyed nearly all the old buildings in the Inner Temple. Only the Church and a fragment of the Hall survive from medieval days. The Great Fire (1666), which left the Middle Temple almost unscathed, wrought devastation in the Inner. The Inn was then rebuilt with great rapidity, the erection of Chambers being left to the enterprise of Members, as before, whilst the Society as a whole devoted itself to the construction of the Library and Moot-Chamber beneath. In the fire of 1678 the old Library was blown up with gunpowder in order to save the Hall. The present Inner Temple Hall is a crude, pseudo-Gothic structure, which was designed by Sydney Smirke, and was opened by the Princess Louise in 1870. It supplanted the restored and tinkered remains of the old Hall. For the ancient Refectory of the Knights Templars stood in the time of Henry VII. on the same site as this Hall, and does, indeed, form the nucleus of it.[44] The Clock Tower, at the East end of the Library, which forms one side of the nondescript Tanfield Court, perpetuates an ancient tower, which was surmounted by a turret built of chalk, rubble, and ragstone, like the Church, and carried a bell under a wooden cupola. It stood near to this spot, and was attached to the Treasurer’s house. The feeble architecture of the exterior is agreeably at variance with the fine interior of the Hall, with its open timber roof and handsome screen. Upon the panelled walls, like those of the Middle Temple Hall, are painted the coats of arms of past Treasurers and Readers, in perpetuation, as it were, of the old custom of the Knights Templars, who used to hang their shields upon the walls when they sat two by two at dinner in the old Hall, wherein, as the Accusers averred, the Novices of the Order were compelled to spit upon the Cross, to kiss an Idol with a black face and shining eyes, and to worship the Golden Head kept in the Treasury adjoining. The doors in the panelling at the East End lead now to nothing more thrilling than Parliament Chambers--‘a handsome set of rooms, the walls of which are covered with portraits and engravings of legal luminaries.’[45] In the minstrel gallery hang some old drums and banners, which serve to remind us of the martial achievements of the Lawyers, when ‘forth they ride a-colonelling.’ Two very richly carved doors at the north and south entrances to the Hall, one of which bears the date 1575, are reasonably supposed to be surviving fragments of the great carved screen, said by Dugdale to have been erected in the Hall in 1574.