The institution in question is a chantry college, a type of religious foundation common in the later Middle Ages in which priests were endowed specifically to sing masses for the souls of their patrons. This one was founded in 1482 by Philip Goold, rector of Holy Trinity, and by the time the seventeenth century was well under way, it had already fallen into ruin. By 1670 it was gone, more or less, from the visible fabric of the city.

What makes the site worth knowing about is partly what survives above ground and partly what was recovered below it. A mantelpiece from the college is now held in the Crawford Art Gallery, a carved limestone piece decorated with seven ornamental panels and bearing an inscription dated 1585, which places it a full century after Goold's original foundation and suggests the college was still active and being furnished well into the late sixteenth century. Excavations carried out in 1975 by Twohig uncovered structural remains along the southern side of Christ Church Lane, to the south of the present church. The building traced was rectangular, roughly twenty metres by eight, constructed from cut limestone blocks and surviving in places to a height of three metres above its foundation course, which is a considerable amount of a medieval structure to find intact beneath a city that has been continuously occupied and rebuilt for centuries.

The mantelpiece in the Crawford Art Gallery is the most accessible trace of the college today. It sits in a public collection, which means the carved panels and that 1585 date can be examined properly, in detail, without any need to imagine what the original building might have looked like. The archaeological remains beneath Christ Church Lane are not visible, but knowing they exist changes the texture of walking that part of the city.