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Updated: June 16, 2025
At the far end of the clearing, a fir grew high above the neighbouring wood, and planted its black shock of foliage clear against the sky. For about fifty feet above the ground the trunk grew straight and solid like a column. At that level, it split into two massive boughs; and in the fork, like a mast-headed seaman, there stood a man in a green tabard, spying far and wide.
O prepare mercy and truth which may preserve him." Such was the remarkable prayer of the condemned traitor on his way to the block. Having ascended the scaffold, he walked across it twice or thrice. He was dressed in a tabard or robe of red damask, over which was thrown a short black mantle, embroidered in gold.
Most probably they went on foot, the distance being so short, preceded by a glittering herald and pursuivant perhaps David Lindsay, who can tell? still too young to wear the Lion of Scotland on his tabard, but keen and curious to see this scene he who had seen the envoy of heaven in Linlithgow Church and so many other wonderful things.
At the Tabard Inn in Southwark, just across the Thames from London, we see that merry band of pilgrims on a pleasant April day. We look first upon a manly figure who strikes us as being every inch a knight. His cassock shows the marks of his coat of mail. "At mortal batailles hadde he been fiftene. * And of his port as meke as is a mayde.
At another side ran a large wooden staircase, with an open gallery, propped on wooden columns, conducting to numerous chambers, after the fashion of the Tabard in Southwark, immortalized by Chaucer.
The chryselephantine papal standard rises high, surrounded by pennons of the civic flag. The van of the procession appears headed by John Howard Parnell, city marshal, in a chessboard tabard, the Athlone Poursuivant and Ulster King of Arms.
Brief as was the interval of our colloquy, the scene within had, notwithstanding, undergone considerable change. The English officers, hastily throwing off their aldermanic robes, were busily arraying themselves in their uniforms, while Monsoon himself, with a huge basin of water before him, was endeavoring to wash the cork from his countenance in the corner of his tabard.
I said to myself, as I stepped along in the spring morning air; for, being a pilgrim, I was involuntarily in a mediaeval frame of mind, and "Marry! an odd adventure!" came to my lips as though I had been one of that famous company that once started from the Tabard on a day in spring.
Chaucer's pilgrims have, and so long as the mere name of the Tabard survives, its recollection will bring in its train a moving picture of that merry and motley company which set out for the shrine of À Becket so many generations ago. Poetic license bestows upon another notable Southwark inn, the Bear at Bridge-foot, an antiquity far eclipsing that of the Tabard.
Here! drag him to the market place! slash him with bridle reins and dog whips until the tabard hang about him in tatters! Upon the Rouge Sanglier! ca, ca! Haloo, haloo!"
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