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The Tabard was an inn in Southwark established in 1307, which 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 Hyde Abbey in Winchester, 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 by Geoffrey Chaucer.
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: Southwark: Famous inns, Old and New London: Volume 6 (1878), pp. 76–89, accessed: 16 June 2008
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 antiquary John Stow wrote in his Survey that by the 16th century it was among several inns at this location in Southwark: "many fair inns, for receipt of travellers, by these signs: the Spurre, Christopher, Bull, Queen's Head, Tabard, George, Hart, King's Head" &c.Quoted in Walter Thornbury and Edward Walford, Old and New London: A Narrative of Its History, Its People and Its Places (London) 1893:76.
Following the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the mid-16th century, "the Tabard of the Monastery of Hyde, and the Abbot's Place, with the stable and gardens thereunto belonging" were sold to John and Thomas Master. The goldsmith John Mabbe (died 1578) acquired the inn. His son Robert Mabbe pledged a share of the inn to the goldsmith Affabel Partridge for a loan.William Rendle & Philip Norman, Inns of Old Southwark (London, 1888), pp. 405-411.
The layout of the Tabard Inn was described in a lease in 1540,Philip Norman, 'Tabard Inn', 13:1 Surrey archaeological collections, (London, 1896), pp. 28–32 and in a legal dispute, Partridge v. Mabbe, in 1601. Named rooms in 1601 included a parlour, the dark parlour, a hall, the chamber called the "flower de luce", a kitchen, the cook's lofts, and oven house.Hubert Hall, Society in the Elizabethan Age (London, 1887), pp. 82, 162
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