Something remained that should have been sacred, not indeed from Chaucer’s day but at least from that of the Restoration, something that was beautiful, till some forty years ago.  All is gone now; of the old Inn as we may see it in a drawing of 1810, a two-storied building with steepish roofs of tiles, dormer windows and railed balconies supported below by pillars of stone, above by pillars of wood, standing about two sides of a courtyard in which the carrier’s long covered carts from Horsham or Rochester are waiting, nothing at all remains.  The last of it was finally destroyed in 1875, and the Tabard Inn of the new fashion was built at the corner as we see.

The old hostelry, which besides its own beauty had this claim also upon our reverence, that it represented in no unworthy fashion the birthplace as it were of English poetry, owes of course all its fame to Chaucer, who lay there on the night before he set out for Canterbury as he tells us: 

When that Aprille with his shoures sote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote.... 
Bifel that, in that season on a day
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At night was come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a companye
Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde;
The chambres and the shelter weren wyde,
And wel we weren esed atte beste
And shortly, whan the sonne was to reste,
So hadde I spoken with hem everichon,
That I was of hir felawshipe anon
And made forward erly for to ryse,
To take our wey, there as I yow devyse.

It is in these verses lies all the fame of the Tabard, which it might seem was not a century old when Chaucer lay there.  In the year 1304 the Abbot of Hyde, near Winchester, bought two houses here held of the Archbishop of Canterbury by William de Lategareshall.  The abbot bought these houses in order to have room to build himself a town house, and it is said that at the same time he built a hostelry for travellers; at any rate three years later we find him applying to the Bishop of Winchester for leave to build a chapel “near the inn.”  In a later deed we are told that “the abbots lodgeinge was wyninge to the backside of the inn called the Tabarde and had a garden attached.”  Stow, however, tells us:  “Within this inn was also the lodging of the Abbot of Hide (by the city of Winchester), a fair house for him and his train when he came from that city to Parliament.”

Here then from the Inn of the Abbot of Hyde Chaucer set out for Canterbury with those pilgrims, many of whose portraits he has given us with so matchless a power.  The host of the inn at that time was Harry Bailey, member of Parliament for Southwark in 1376 and 1379.  He was the wise and jocund leader of the pilgrimage as we know, and though Chaucer speaks of him last, not one of the pilgrims is drawn with a livelier touch than he: