Hello beautiful community,
Every since I saw this scene in LOTR long time ago it stuck in my mind, and I've always wondered if such an urban setting actually existed in history.
I mean the gate, with a guard, and a relaxed entry and exit of people. (as you can see, Frodo and his friends enter even refusing to state their business... and showing a bit of offense at being questioned...)
I've seen this motif in several shows and stories in several languages actually...
Happy to hear your thoughts :)
Edit 1: (btw, I asked this question also in (1) /r/lotr and (2) r/urbanstudies)
Edit 2: wow this post much more upvotes than I ever expected... Allow me to also link this scene from a very different T.V. show but which also stuck with me (it seems I've always had a thing for these gates for some reason). It's from a very famous Syrian T.V. drama of the Old Damascene genre called "Bāb al-Ḥāra" (literally the Gate of the Neighborhood").
You can see exactly the same concept: there's a famous gate to this town, that's the guard enjoying some tea with a resident friend, and you can see the suspicious women in veil entering the ḥāra.
Frankfurt am Main, 1565.
Frankfurt is a happening town, flourishing economically and culturally. It means the city has a few gates to handle all the traffic coming from multiple directions. It also means, as this things are wont to mean in medieval and early modern Germany, the regular old burghers and the patricians (think urban nobility) do not get along.
So we're going to have a stroll to St. Katherine's Gate. According to the court records, Hans Heckpecher was a Frankfurt burgher coming back home. Philipp Weiss von Limpurg was a patrician who wanted to leave, and had the mindset that Heckpecher was riding through his gate just when he had the right to leave.
So Phil yanked Hans off his donkey, Hans cursed at him, Philipp pulled out a knife, and the gate guards and random passers-by pulled out their knives as a warning to Philipp.
Fortunately, it didn't go any further. For one thing, two agents of the mayor were there, in addition to the gates' guards, to arrest Heckpecher (probably for swearing, although I don't have the actual court record to see) and Weiss (probably for the obvious).
I like this anecdote because it's a fun way of showing that, yes, even in the early modern era passage through town gates could be more casual in the right circumstances--that is to say, if the town was at peace, and if the guards recognized you.
On the other hand, although we tend to think of walls as defense, a major reason for town walls and gates was financial. Visitors and anyone bringing in goods were generally subject to tolls and taxes.
In Sandwich, in England, according to one case study, there may even have been gates when the town "wall" was a series of earthen ramparts around part of the town in the early fourteenth century. But don't just think an opening in a mound of dirt. Although very few earth-walls survive, Sandwich's shows that they were reasonably sophisticated: hardpacked clay around and above pebbles, gravel, and flint--and forced into a uniform and effective size and shape with evidently no guiding superstructure.
Over the course of the 1300s and 1400s--which is to say the Hundred Years' War--the town gradually built more formal walls of stone and eventually brick. Then there is formal evidence of gates.
There are some great woodcuts of fifteenth-century Nuremberg where you can see the stereotypical "arched entrance in a stone wall at the end of a bridge"-style gate, even!
Gate guards were definitely common, although they would more likely be assigned from the casual town militia (in some Iberian towns where I've read about this, at least, militia duty was more of a rotation among young men than a career). And for the most part, their job would have been economic and well as peace-keeping.
So the FOTR movie's old dude with a lantern? Perhaps not so much. But town walls and a gate in peacetime, and a more casual attitude? That was definitely possible.