A seemly man our hoste was withal, For to have ben a marshall in an hall, A large man he was with eyen steep, A fairer burgess was there none in Chepe: Bold of his speeche, and wys and well y-taught, And of manhood him lackede righte noughte.
The old Tabard was partly burnt down in the great Southwark fire in 1676, and on rebuilding the ruined portion “that ignorant landlord or tenant,” Aubrey tells us, “instead of the ancient sign of the Tabard put up the Talbot or doge.” In this condition it remained until a few years ago, when, despite the protests of the antiquarian world, despite the pages of remonstrance with which the newspapers and magazines were filled, it was pulled down, and is now replaced by a tall brick building. Had we not enough and to spare of these tall brick buildings?
At the time when Knight wrote his _History of London_, the original house was sufficiently complete for him to leave us a description of the old arched entrance to the inn-yard, the balustraded galleries on which the bedrooms opened, the gabled roofs, the panelled rooms, and last, { 203} but not least, the Pilgrim’s room, which tradition said was the veritable scene of the supper on the night before the guests set out upon their world-famed pilgrimage.
John Lydgate, a Benedictine monk of Bury St. Edmunds, writing about the same time as Chaucer, mentions that Cornhill was in his time noted for its taverns, where was “wine one pint for a pennie, and bread to drink it was given free at every tavern.”
In a black-letter sheet entitled _Newes from Bartholomew Fayre_, of probably the early part of the seventeenth century, some of the most famous inns of London are thus whimsically enumerated:—
There has been great sale and utterance of wine, Besides Beer, Ale, and Hippocrass fine, In every country, region, and Nation, Chiefly at Billings-gate, at the Salutation; And Boreshead near London Stone, The Swan at Dowgate, a tavern well knowne; The Mitre in Cheap, and the Bull-head, And many like places that make noses red; The Boreshead in Old Fish Street, Three Cranes in the Vintree And now, of late, Saint Martin’s in the Sentree; The Windmill in Lothbury, the Ship at the Exchange, King’s Head in New Fish Street, where Roysters do range; The Mermaid in Cornhill, Red Lion in the Strand, Three Tuns in Newgate Market, in Old Fish Street the Swan.