So far, we have spoken of Thames Street and the riverside generally; let us now take our section in detail. Only a short way to the north lay =Ludgate=, one of the principal entrances to the City. Ludgate can hardly have been so named later than the Norman Conquest. Stow, in his explanation of the ancient street leading from Aldgate to Ludgate, clearly conveys the belief that it was an ancient gate. Perhaps the necessity of land communications from the City to Westminster caused the piercing of this gate and the construction of the causeway and the bridge over the valley and stream of the Fleet. In that case, one would naturally think of King Knut and his palace at Westminster. The name is said to mean a postern. Ludgate was either repaired or rebuilt in 1215, when the barons, in arms against King John, entered London and destroyed the houses of the Jews, using the stones in the restoration of the City walls and of Ludgate more especially. Stow records a curious confirmation of this circumstance, the discovery, when the gate was rebuilt in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, of a stone with a Hebrew inscription, signifying the sign or note of Rabbi Moses, the son of Rabbi Isaac. On the east side, in a niche, on this renewal, were placed the statues of Lud and his two sons in Roman costumes; and on the west side the statue of Queen Elizabeth. When the gates were taken down (1761-62), Lud and his sons were given by the City to Sir Francis Gosling, who intended to set them up at the east end of St. Dunstan’s Church, in Fleet Street. This, however, he did not carry into effect, and the king and his two sons were deposited in the parish bone-house. The statue of Elizabeth met with a better fate, having a niche assigned it in the outer wall of old St. Dunstan’s, Fleet Street. The Lud gate of 1586 was gutted in the Great Fire, and the stonework seriously injured. Ludgate was first erected into a prison in the reign of Richard II., and was anciently appropriated to the freemen of the City and to clergymen. The place soon became too small for the growing occasions of the City, and it was enlarged at the expense of Dame Agnes Forster, widow of Stephen Forster, mayor in 1454.