In Defence of the City: The Gates of London and Temple Bar in the Seventeenth Century
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the seventeenth century London was a walled city, as it had been since the Romans fortified it around 200 AD. The gates erected by the Romans on the most important routes in and out of the city were rebuilt on their ancient foundations in the medieval period, when posterns (smaller passageways) were added in the wall and a huge ditch was dug around the outside. By the seventeenth century, there were seven principal gates in the old wall: from east to west starting from the Tower, they were Aldgate, Bishopsgate, Moorgate, Cripplegate, Aldersgate, Newgate and Ludgate. On the bridge across the River Thames – the only point of entry to the City from the south – there were two more gates. The ditch, as John Stow recorded in his Survey of London (first published in 1598), was ‘of late neglected and forced either to a very narrow, and the same a filthy channel, or altogether stopped up for gardens planted, and houses builded thereon’. This treatment of the ditch points to how the urban fabric had long since pushed through the gates and beyond the old walls; this area ‘without’, but still under the City’s jurisdiction, was known as the Liberties. In Hollar’s map of London in the later seventeenth century (Fig. 1), the walls and gates are a clearly visible feature defining the core of the City, which none the less spreads beyond them, in particular to the west. The limits of the Liberties were marked on main roads by ‘bars’, usually consisting of posts and chains, as at Holborn (to the north) or Whitechapel (to the east). Temple Bar, however, situated on Fleet Street to the west of Ludgate, had been made a gateway by the mid-fourteenth century, a reflection of its importance as the main point of transition between the Cities of London and Westminster. As such Temple Bar was considered one of the City gates; it was the eighth gate in the engraved plate that accompanied John Strype’s version of Stow’s Survey , published in 1720 (Fig. 2).
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it