Known historically as the manor of the Chanter, it takes its name from the precentor, or chanter, of the city's medieval church, an official whose role was to direct the liturgical music of the cathedral. That a senior church musician would have held a manor house in the city speaks to how substantially the medieval church was woven into the fabric of urban property and administration.

The building enters the documentary record clearly in 1577, when the English crown granted a twenty-one year lease to one Hercules Raynsforde, gentleman, for two water mills described as now decayed, standing in a single structure known as the King's Mills on the bank of the Shannon. The lease document, cited by Nicholls in 1994, carefully maps the boundaries of this arrangement: the Cordwainers' district lay to the west, and the manor of the chanter of the church of the city to the other side, described as parcel of the queen's ancient inheritance. That phrase places the property within the crown's claimed holdings at a moment when Tudor authority over Irish towns was being actively asserted and inventoried. The same building, or at least its designation, persisted into the following century. Research by O'Flaherty, published in 2010, records it as the Chanter's House in 1663, more than eighty years after that Elizabethan lease was drawn up, suggesting the name and structure both survived the considerable upheavals of the intervening decades.

Newgate Lane sits within the older street grain of Limerick City, and the building's position on the north side of the lane places it close to the historic core of the medieval town. Anyone with an interest in urban archaeology would find it worth locating on O'Flaherty's detailed research maps of the city. The structure itself is a reminder that medieval Limerick was a place of layered ownership, where church manors, royal mills, and guild territories pressed closely against one another along the same riverbank.