His task as controller of customs was to check and certify that the right taxes were levied on key goods leaving London (wool, sheepskins, leather) by the collector of the taxes. He had held this post for some twelve years, longer than anyone else managed in that period, and he had a comfortable house over the city gate at Aldgate, just a few minutes walk from the customs house.
At the beginning of 1386, Chaucer was living a settled life in London as Controller of the Customs for the Port of London. It appears that sometime before 1386 Chaucer completed his other great masterwork, Troilus and Criseyde, leaving him free to work on something even more ambitious. Paul Strohm argues in his excellent and very readable Chaucer's Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury (Penguin, 2015) that 1386 is the key year in both Chaucer's life and in the composition of the Canterbury Tales. The date: why 1388? 1386 and The Lords Appellant It may be relevant that Southwark was also home to many of London's best-known brothels ("stews"). He was a Member of Parliament twice, held various other offices, and is named as an innkeeper ("ostlyer") in the Subsidy Rolls for Southwark in 1380-81, though not explicitly linked to the Tabard. Harry Bailey is named in more than twenty historical documents from 1375 to 1398. The original building was destroyed by fire in 1676.
The Tabard is named in many historical documents, located in Southwark, south of London Bridge in what is now Borough Market, on the eastern side of the approach to the road to Kent, and so on Chaucer's direct route from Kent to London. Chaucer designates the Tabard as the meeting place for the pilgrims and the starting point of their pilgrimage in the opening lines of the General Prologue, and names Harry Bailey (or Bailly) as the host of the pilgrimage (and hence, the host of the Tabard) in the prologue to the Cook's Tale. It appears that this pub and its landlord, Harry Bailey, were famous (or notorious) in late C14 London. He might have met with his fellow poets in a pub, and one night at the pub performed the Miller's Tale for his friends. We suppose that Chaucer made occasional trips to London from Kent in the period between 13, where it seems he went to keep himself safe from the Lords Appellant.
We hypothesize that the Miller's Tale was one of the first parts of Geoffrey Chaucer's new work (provisionally titled, it seems, "The Book of the Tales of Canterbury") to have been written, some time after 1386 when Chaucer began work on the Tales.
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