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