Within one of the circular turrets over the Gate, on the south-east, are the remains of an oratory, the piscina being still visible in the wall. It was before this tower, on the night of St George’s Day 1240, that the gateway with the adjacent wall of St Thomas’s Tower suddenly fell to the ground. In the following year, on the same anniversary, the newly-built tower and gate again fell prone. That such a catastrophe should occur twice on the night of the 23rd of April was attributed by the Londoners to supernatural causes; and rumour spread that on that very night (Mathew Paris is the authority) the spectre of an Archbishop, crozier in hand, had appeared to one of the Tower priests whilst standing near St Thomas’s Tower. After gazing sternly at the priest and on the walls of the tower then rebuilding, the spectre struck the stones with his crozier, exclaiming, “Why build ye these?” and down fell the newly-erected tower and wall. The spectre was supposed to be St Thomas of Canterbury, from whom the tower took its name, but after the building had arisen for the third time, the restorer has been the only person who has meddled with them. [Illustration: North, or inside, view of TRAITOR’S GATE. _being the principal entrance of the Tower of London, from the River, and through which state prisoners of rank and dignity were formerly conveyed to the Tower._] A passage connected this tower with the Wakefield Tower, on the right of the Bloody Tower, and was restored by Salvin, to enable the Keeper of the Regalia, who has his quarters in St Thomas’s Tower, to pass into the Wakefield Tower, where the jewels are kept, without leaving the building. The Wakefield Tower and its companion, the Bloody Tower, form one block of buildings. According to recent authorities this tower is principally the work of the reigns of Stephen and of Henry III. Formerly it was called the Record or Hall Tower, and for many centuries contained the documents relating to the fortress, now kept in the Record Office in Chancery Lane. Its second name of Hall Tower was probably given to it because of its proximity to the great hall of the Palace, which was destroyed by Cromwell, where the courts of justice met in the Middle Ages. Its present name is no doubt derived from the prisoners who were taken at the battle of Wakefield in December 1460, when the Lancastrians, led by Warwick, defeated the Yorkists. The unhappy Yorkists were interned in a vaulted chamber in the basement of the tower; and here also another civil war, that of 1745, brought a shoal of Scottish prisoners into this dismal dungeon when the mortality amongst them was terrible. Salvin restored the tower, without and within, in 1867. Some frescoes on the walls of the rooms on the first floor could still be traced up to that time, but nothing of these most interesting relics of early English art have been left by the restorers.