Inns and Taverns of Old London | Page 3

so clearly as
that it was chosen by Chaucer as the starting-point for his immortal
Canterbury pilgrims. More than two centuries had passed since Thomas
à Becket had fallen before the altar of St. Benedict in the minster of
Canterbury, pierced with many swords as his reward for contesting the
supremacy of the Church against Henry II.
"What a parcel of fools and dastards have I nourished in my house,"
cried the monarch when the struggle had reached an acute stage, "that
not one of them will avenge me of this one upstart clerk!"
Four knights took the king at his word, posted with all speed to
Canterbury, and charged the prelate to give way to the wishes of the
sovereign.
"In vain you threaten me," À Becket rejoined. "If all the swords in
England were brandishing over my head, your terrors could not move

me. Foot to foot you will find me fighting the battle of the Lord."
And then the swords of the knights flashed in the dim light of the
minster and another name was added to the Church's roll of martyrs.
The murder sent a thrill of horror through all Christendom; À Becket
was speedily canonized, and his tomb became the objective of
countless pilgrims from every corner of the Christian world.
In Chaucer's days, some two centuries later, the pilgrimage had become
a favourite occupation of the devout. Each awakening of the year, when
the rains of April had laid the dust of March and aroused the buds of
tree and herb from their winter slumber, the longing to go on a
pilgrimage seized all classes alike.
"And specially, from every shires ende Of Engelond, to Caunterbury
they wende, The holy blisful martir for to seke, That hem hath holpen,
whan that they were seke."
Precisionists of the type who are never satisfied unless they can apply
chronology in the realm of imagination will have it that Chaucer's
pilgrimage was a veritable event, and that it took place in April, 1388.
They go further still and identify Chaucer's host with the actual Henry
Bailley, who certainly was in possession of the Tabard in years not
remote from that date. The records show that he twice represented the
borough of Southwark in Parliament, and another ancient document
bears witness how he and his wife, Christian by name, were called
upon to contribute two shillings to the subsidy of Richard II. These are
the dry bones of history; for the living picture of the man himself
recourse must be had to Chaucer's verse:
"A semely man our hoste was with-alle For to han been a marshal in an
halle; A large man he was with eyen stepe, A fairer burgeys is ther
noon in Chepe; Bold of his speche, and wys, and well y-taught, And of
manhood him lakkede right naught. Eke thereto he was right a merry
man."
No twentieth century pilgrim to the Tabard inn must expect to find its
environment at all in harmony with the picture enshrined in Chaucer's
verse. The passing years have wrought a woeful and materializing
change. The opening lines of the Prologue are permeated with a sense
of the month of April, a "breath of uncontaminate springtide" as Lowell
puts it, and in those far-off years when the poet wrote, the beauties of
the awakening year were possible of enjoyment in Southwark. Then the

buildings of the High street were spaciously placed, with room for field
and hedgerow; to-day they are huddled as closely together as the hand
of man can set them, and the verdure of grass and tree is unknown. Nor
is it otherwise with the inn itself, for its modern representative has no
points of likeness to establish a kinship with the structure visualized in
Chaucer's lines. It is true the poet describes the inn more by suggestion
than set delineation, but such hints that it was "a gentle hostelry," that
its rooms and stables were alike spacious, that the food was of the best
and the wine of the strongest go further with the imagination than
concrete statements.
[Illustration: GEOFFREY CHAUCER.]
Giving faith for the moment to that theory which credits the Canterbury
Tales with being based on actual experience, and recalling the quaint
courtyard of the inn as it appeared on that distant April day of 1388, it
is a pleasant exercise of fancy to imagine Chaucer leaning over the rail
of one of the upper galleries to watch the assembling of his
nine-and-twenty "sondry folk." They are, as J. R. Green has said,
representatives of every class of English society from the noble to the
ploughman. "We see the 'verray-perfight gentil knight' in cassock and
coat of mail, with his curly-headed squire beside him, fresh as the May
morning, and behind them the brown-faced yeoman