In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, the pilgrimage sets out from the Tabard Inn in Southwark.
The General Prologue places the narrator and the other pilgrims at the Tabard, where they meet before traveling to Canterbury Cathedral. The inn provides the frame for the storytelling contest: each traveler is expected to tell tales on the journey, with the Host acting as organizer and judge.
The Tabard was a real medieval inn in Southwark, an area just south of the River Thames and outside the medieval City of London. Chaucer’s setting connects the fictional storytelling group to the busy roads and institutions of late-fourteenth-century England.
Readers sometimes confuse the Tabard with the later George Inn, which also stood in Southwark and remains famous today. The George is associated with literary tourism, but Chaucer specifically names the Tabard. The Canterbury Tales survives unfinished, so the planned storytelling competition does not reach the full design described at the beginning.