The George Inn and the Tabard: Where Chaucer's Pilgrims Set Out
Why is it significant?
Turn off Borough High Street into the cobbled yard and look at the long black-and-white building, its wooden galleries stacked one above the other along the upper floors. This is the George, the last galleried coaching inn in London, and it belongs to the National Trust.
Key Facts
| Place | The George Inn and the Tabard: Where Chaucer's Pilgrims Set Out |
|---|---|
| Address | 75-77 Borough High Street, London SE1 1NH, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.50420, -0.09000 |
| Part of Walk | Shakespeare's Southwark: Bankside, the Globe and Tate Modern in London |
| Generated | Generated |
Turn off Borough High Street into the cobbled yard and look at the long black-and-white building, its wooden galleries stacked one above the other along the upper floors. This is the George, the last galleried coaching inn in London, and it belongs to the National Trust.
Inns like this once lined Borough High Street, because this was the main road into London from Canterbury, Dover and the Channel ports. Travellers who arrived after the gates of London Bridge had closed for the night slept here and crossed in the morning. The present building dates from 1677, rebuilt after a great fire swept through Southwark the year before. Picture the galleries running all the way round the yard, as they once did: before the purpose-built playhouses, companies of players set up their stages in yards like this, and many historians see the Rose and the Globe as that idea made permanent.
Now step back to the street and find the narrow passage next door called Talbot Yard. Here stood the Tabard Inn, and here, one April evening in the 1380s, twenty-nine pilgrims gathered for the ride to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury... at least in the imagination of Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales opens at the Tabard, where the jolly host, Harry Bailly, proposes a contest: each pilgrim will tell stories on the road, and whoever tells the best wins a free supper here on the way home.
The delicious detail is that the innkeeper was real. A Henry Bailly appears in fourteenth-century records as an innkeeper of Southwark and as one of its members of Parliament. Chaucer, a customs official who seems to have known everybody, dropped a living Londoner straight into his fiction, the way a novelist today might put a well-known landlord into a story about a pub crawl.
The Tabard, later renamed the Talbot, was pulled down in the 1870s, and the George itself lost most of its galleries to a railway company around the same time. A few doors north stood the White Hart, where Dickens has Mr Pickwick first meet Sam Weller. Walk north to St Thomas Street, turn right, and follow it to the gates of Guy's Hospital.