Since it contained the headquarters of so many stage coaches, carts and waggons, the High Street was bound to contain, as well, many houses of entertainment, if only as stables for the horses and accommodation for the drivers and grooms. The inns of Southwark, however, were far more ancient than the stage coaches. We have seen already that from the earliest times of trade the southern suburb was the place where merchants and those who brought produce of all kinds to London out of the south country put up their teams of pack-horses and their goods, and found bed and board and company for themselves. We have also seen how the inns of Southwark were used as gathering places and starting places for the Pilgrims bound for St. Thomas's Shrine, Canterbury. The mediæval inn was not much like that of later times. It contained a common hall and a common dormitory, with another for women. There was also a covered place for goods, and stables for horses. A small specimen of a fifteenth-century inn survives at Aylesbury: the hall, quite a small room, is very well preserved. That of the Tabard must have been much larger, in order to accommodate so large a company. The quaint old inns, so long the delight of the artist, now nearly all gone, were not earlier than the sixteenth or seventeenth century. They consisted of a large open courtyard filled with waggons and vehicles of all kinds, surrounded by galleries, at the back of which were bedrooms, and other chambers opening from the gallery. On the ground floor were the kitchens, dining-rooms, and private sitting-rooms. There was generally a large room for public dinners and other occasions. The inns of Southwark formed, so long as they stood, the most picturesque part of modern Southwark. Scarcely anything now remains of them, the George alone preserving anything of its ancient picturesqueness. The reader who desires a closer acquaintance with these inns is referred to Mr. Philip Norman's exquisitely illustrated book, which presents in a lasting form the vanished glories of the High Street. To speak of these inns is like entering upon a historical catalogue. There are so many of them, and the associations connected with them carry one away into so many directions and land him into many strange corners of history.