Tabard
an outer garment. The tabard worn by the plowman in Chaucer's Prologue to the Canterbury Tales was a rough cloak of heavy woolen material used by working people as a protection against severe weather. The military tabard of the fifteenth century was a loose shirt-like garment, having usually short sleeves or none at all, worn over the armor. It was customarily embroidered with the family arms of the wearer. About the middle of the sixteenth century it ceased to be worn, except by heralds. The painter Vandyke has left a drawing of two English heralds of the seventeenth century clad in their official tabards, decorated with the arms of their sovereign. In Marmion Scott speaks of the tabard as the distinctive dress of the herald:
With silver scutcheon round their neck,
Stood on the steps of stone.
The Tabard Inn, from which Chaucer's Pilgrims started on their trip to Canterbury, stood south of the Thames in the suburb of London known as Southwark, near the road for Kent. It took its name from the picture of a tabard on the signboard. The old hostelry was torn down in 1866 to make room for a freight depot.