Around 1540, a structure known as the Vicar's Hall was operating out of the former refectory of Holy Trinity Priory, a detail noted by historian H.B. Clarke in a 2002 publication. That a great communal dining hall of an Augustinian priory had by that point been repurposed into something called a Vicar's Hall tells a story about the turbulent decades of the Reformation, when ecclesiastical buildings across Ireland were being dissolved, redistributed, and put to new uses almost faster than anyone could document them.

Holy Trinity Priory, also known as Christ Church Priory, was one of the most significant religious houses in medieval Dublin, closely associated with the cathedral that still dominates that part of the city today. A refectory was the communal dining room of a monastic house, typically a large, well-built space that lent itself to reuse once the original community had been dispersed or reduced. By the time Clarke's reference places the Vicar's Hall there around 1540, the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII was well underway in Ireland, and the buildings that had once housed religious communities were passing into the hands of new occupants with different functions in mind. The vicars choral, a body of singers attached to the cathedral, were among those who inherited or occupied spaces in the aftermath of these changes, though the precise institutional arrangements at this particular hall remain obscure.

The difficulty with this site is that its location has not been precisely identified. Clarke's reference gives us a moment in time and a connection to the priory complex, but not a street address or a surviving structure. The area around Christ Church Cathedral still contains layers of medieval fabric beneath and within later buildings, and archaeological investigations in Dublin's south city have occasionally turned up unexpected remnants of the priory's former footprint. Anyone with a particular interest in the site would be better served by consulting the relevant volume of Clarke's work directly, or by visiting the medieval quarter around Christ Church and Winetavern Street with the understanding that the ground underfoot holds considerably more than the visible streetscape suggests.