The Tabard, an inn that stood on the east side of Borough High Street in Southwark, Surrey, was established in 1307, when the abbot of Hyde purchased the land to construct a hostel for himself and his brethren, when business took them to London, as well as an inn to accommodate the numerous pilgrims headed on annual pilgrimage to the Shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. The Tabard is famous as the place owned by Harry Bailey, the host in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.

The inn is described in the first few lines of Chaucer's work as the location where the pilgrims first meet on their journey to Canterbury in the 1380s:

Bifel that in that season on a day,
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At nyght was come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye
Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle
In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde;
The chambres and the stables weren wyde,
And well we weren esed atte beste;