By 1383 to 1384, the abbot of Duiske, referred to in contemporary records as 'Abbas de Dowysky', was listed as a burgess of Kilkenny, meaning he held civic standing and property rights within the town. A burgage plot was a standard unit of urban landholding in medieval Irish towns, typically a long, narrow strip running back from a street frontage to a rear garden or boundary wall. The connection between the abbey's townhouse and what later became the Rothe complex is confirmed in a 1594 deed, which describes a messuage and garden where John Rothe fitz Piers then lived as being 'parcel of the possessions of the abbey of Dowske'. When the Rothe family began constructing their ambitious three-house complex between 1594 and 1610, they appear to have swept away most of the earlier structures. But not everything was destroyed. Archaeological excavations carried out at various points across the site uncovered a stone-lined cesspit whose twelve alternating layers of cess and damping deposits yielded pottery dating to the early to mid fourteenth century, including Saintonge Sgraffitto ware imported from southwest France and locally produced Kilkenny-type and Leinster Cooking Ware. A well constructed by the Rothes in 1604 was found to have been built directly over one half of a much larger rectangular well of medieval date; partial excavation of its fill produced further thirteenth and fourteenth-century pottery, iron nails, metal slag, and animal bones. In the rear garden area, which stretched back towards the old town wall, excavations also revealed medieval refuse pits, remnant horticultural soils, a burgage fence line, and a separate stone-lined well dated by its associated ceramics to the same broad period. A stone culvert and sections of walling buried beneath the later Rothe structures round out a picture of a busy, well-appointed urban property that served the abbey's practical and administrative needs in the town for generations.