The Tabard
The Tabard was an inn in Southwark established in 1307 that stood on the east side of Borough High Street, at the road's intersection with the ancient thoroughfare to Canterbury and Dover. It was built for the Abbot of Hyde, who purchased the land to construct a place for himself and his ecclesiastical brethren to stay when on business in London.
The Tabard was famous for accommodating people who made the pilgrimage to the Shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, and it is mentioned in the 14th-century literary work The Canterbury Tales.
Early history
The inn was located on the south bank of the
Chaucer wrote that the Tabard was the location where the pilgrims first met on their journey to Canterbury in the 1380s. The inn's proprietor was a man named Harry Bailey:[1]
Bifel that in that season on a day,
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At nyght was come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye
Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde;
The chambres and the stables weren wyde,
And well we weren esed atte beste;
The
Following the
Destruction and replacement
On 26 May 1676, ten years after the Great Fire of London, a great blaze started in Southwark. The Tabard was among many buildings that were either burned down or pulled down to create fire breaks. The blaze, which took 17 hours to contain, destroyed most of medieval Southwark. King Charles II and his brother the Duke of York were both involved in the firefighting effort. Although the medieval building was destroyed, the site was immediately rebuilt and renamed The Talbot.
Closure
In the early 18th century, the new inn was profiting from the growth in
See also
- The George Inn, Southwark, a surviving nearby coaching inn
- White Hart, Southwark, a demolished nearby coaching inn
Notes
- ^ Southwark: Famous inns, Old and New London: Volume 6 (1878), pp. 76–89, accessed: 16 June 2008
- ^ Quoted in Walter Thornbury and Edward Walford, Old and New London: A Narrative of Its History, Its People and Its Places (London) 1893:76.
- ^ William Rendle & Philip Norman, Inns of Old Southwark (London, 1888), pp. 405-411.
External links
- The Tabard Inn in Southwark, another nineteenth-century engraving