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Literary Passion · London, Greater London

The Tabard Inn site (Chaucer's Wife of Bath)

The pilgrims' departure point of the Canterbury Tales — and the stage entrance of the Wife of Bath, five husbands down and gloriously unrepentant, English literature's first great celebrant of appetite. The inn is gone; the voice has never stopped talking.

StatusFact & fiction

DateCanterbury Tales begun c.1387

The peopleGeoffrey Chaucer, the Wife of Bath (fictional)

The siteTalbot Yard, Borough High Street (inn demolished 1873)

Coordinates51.50417, -0.09000 (confidence 3/5)

The story

The most famous inn in English literature is a scrap of office space now, marked by a plaque on Talbot Yard off Borough High Street. But the Tabard was real. Built for the Abbot of Hyde around 1307, it had a landlord named Henry Bailly by 1381 — and when Geoffrey Chaucer set the departure of his Canterbury pilgrims here around 1387, he named his fictional host Harry Bailly, after the actual man behind the actual bar. Chaucer wasn't a full-time poet; he was Controller of Customs for the port of London from 1374, taxing the wool trade — the single largest source of royal revenue in the period. The Canterbury Tales were written around a day job, and they are gloriously rude. The Miller's Tale (seduction, a fake flood, a kiss planted somewhere unexpected in the dark) and the Reeve's Tale (two students, one miller's household, a night of moved beds) are outright fabliaux — obscene comic stories told with genius. Most startling is the Wife of Bath, who talks with total frankness about her five husbands, her appetites, and her belief that women should have "sovereignty" in marriage — an argument no English writer would make so boldly again for centuries. The inn burned in the 1676 Southwark fire, was rebuilt and misnamed the Talbot, and was demolished in 1873. Southwark itself lay under the Bishop of Winchester, whose Bankside brothels feature elsewhere in this book.

More stories at this spot

The Winchester Geese

The prostitutes of Bankside were licensed by the Bishop of Winchester, who took a cut of their earnings — which is why medieval Londoners nicknamed them the "Winchester Geese," and why to be "bitten by a Winchester goose" meant to catch a venereal disease. They worked yards from where Chaucer's pilgrims gathered, in a liberty deliberately placed outside the City's moral jurisdiction.

The Cecily Chaumpaigne release

In 1380 a woman named Cecily Chaumpaigne formally released Chaucer from a charge of "raptus" — a Latin word meaning either rape or abduction. Scholars have argued about it for a century. Recent archival work has suggested the document may relate to a labour dispute rather than an assault, but the record is genuinely ambiguous and the poet's biography carries the shadow.

Sources

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