There are places in London that seem to exist outside of time. For years you pass them unknowingly, carried along by the tide of the city, the buses queuing over the bridge, the hurried stampede of commuters crushing along the pavements, cars bumper to bumper, never suspecting that somewhere beneath the paving stones by the neon lit stores and bars, the ghosts of Chaucer’s pilgrims are setting out for Canterbury.
Talbot Yard in Southwark is a place deeply embedded in our literature, but now is largely forgotten by those who pass it. Just south of London Bridge, down Borough High Street, it survives as a narrow passageway easy to miss. The past is long gone here, replaced with functional modernity, fire escapes, delivery and loading bays.
It is, in all honesty, a grubby little cut-through. The brickwork worn and tagged with graffiti, stencilled scrawls like cheap tattoos down its arms; bin-bags and recycled cardboard stacked in corners; cigarette ends and the spilled debris of the night before, the heady ghost of last orders, drift against the walls. By morning, once the sweepers have cleared away the debris, and the homeless have moved on, a thin tide of hospital staff funnel through on their way to Guy’s. The ordinary unloved business of a working corner of London, shouldering its way through another weekday morning.
And yet here, at the back by the accommodation block for UCL, once stood the Talbot Inn, one of the most famous inns in Medieval England, from whose courtyard Geoffrey Chaucer gathered the company of pilgrims from whom The Canterbury Tales would emerge.
Southwark was the perfect place to begin. At the meeting point of two ancient Roman roads, Watling and Stane Street, it led directly onto London Bridge, at the time the only crossing point into London. To arrive in Southwark was to stand at the threshold of the capital, feel London gather itself around you, the packed river, the press of spires beyond, cooking smoke and the din of bell-song. The High Street was lined with lodging houses and coaching inns, around twenty-three inns at one stage, accommodating those freshly arrived and those about to depart. The Queen’s Head, The Three Tuns, The Spur, The White Hart, Axe and Mermaid, to name a few.
Travellers heading south towards the coast, passed through these streets, looking for groups of merchants and travellers to join; to travel alone was a hazardous occupation in medieval times. Even the point of departure could be dangerous to the unsuspecting. Southwark was a lawless place, gamblers, robbers and prostitutes mingled amongst the population. The Talbot Inn stood at the centre of this restless world. The original inn was established around 1307 and stood on this site until 1873, and became one of the principal gathering points for pilgrims travelling to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral.
Which leads us to Chaucer and the famous The Canterbury Tales, written between 1386 and 1392, it is one of the great journeys in English literature. The book has been in print since the time of Thomas Caxton, the first copies coming off the printing press in 1476 and still remains in print and in bookshops today. The characters have long entered legend, the Knight, the Miller, the Merchant, the Cook, the Wife of Bath and many more.
In Southwark at the Tabard as I lay Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage To Canterbury with ful devout corage, At nyght was come into that hostelrye Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye Of sundry folk, by aventure yfalle In felaweshipe, and pilgrims were they alle, That toward Canterbury wolden ryde.
A cross section of England, a rich diversity, people from every layer of English society, assembled together beneath the roof of a Southwark coaching inn, set to share the journey together, and along the way they each in turn tell their stories. Its a fascinating snap-shot of life at a dramatic period of the middle ages. The people it features were the children of the great plague, the ‘black death’ which had killed nearly half the population, they had witnessed the turbulence and upheaval of the Peasant’s Revolt, the Hundred Years War with France, religious and economic changes, a country becoming modern. Its an astonishing archive, recording what people thought and felt so vividly so long ago.
And that, perhaps, is why Chaucer’s story still feels so alive, so modern. He was writing about people, and how they were adapting to a changing world.
Chaucer understood this.
In this transformative society, at the cusp of the Tudors, where the classes mingled like never before, the pilgrims natter and gossip, they boast and unashamedly flirt, they argue and bicker, exaggerate and complain. Some are pious, others corrupt. Some seek meaning, salvation, others only earthy entertainment and distraction.
Noblemen and labourers. Rogues and priests. Spiritual, ambitious, exhausted, lustful. The respectable, the crass. The holy and the corrupt. Reading The Canterbury Tales today feels strangely much like the present.
And what happened to the old coaching inn. The Tabard was destroyed in a fire and another rose in its place, the Talbot, before the Victorians and the railways swept much of it away. London after all is a city forever dismantling and rebuilding itself.
If you stand in this space, despite the modern world crowding around you, it feels not hard to imagine them here still, Chaucer’s pilgrims, in that warm rainy April of 1386, the stamping of pack horses in the yard, the clatter of goods and gear being loaded, the smell of bodies and wet wool, cooking fires and woodsmoke.
Seven hundred years later, London remains crowded with precisely the same people.
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