The old tholsel of Kilkenny, a tholsel being a combined market house and town hall, stood on the east side of High Street from at least the early fourteenth century until it was demolished around 1795. For nearly five hundred years it served as the commercial and legal nerve centre of the city, and what archaeological investigation has recovered from the ground behind it suggests the surrounding neighbourhood was equally dense with activity.

The building is first mentioned in 1307 as a 'Stallage house' in a survey of the estate of Joan of Acre, Countess of Gloucester, who had held the lordship of Kilkenny. By 1383 it was hosting the town hundred court, a local assembly dealing with minor civil disputes, and a stone structure had been completed on the site by 1507, with a 'great chamber' and stone gate added before 1517. In 1578 the Corporation built a replacement tholsel some 150 metres to the north, yet the old building continued in use under Corporation ownership for roughly another century. John Rocque's 1758 survey of Kilkenny shows it still standing, part of a solid block between Pudding Lane and High Street, with a walled garden and yard stretching westward behind it to the town wall. The tholsel's basement had served as the city gaol, and the nineteenth-century historian John Hogan noted that a section of the old fabric was still visible in the rear wall of the Victoria Hotel as late as the 1880s. That remnant was cleared in 1921 when the hotel was converted into the present bank building, though cellars below may still contain elements of the original structure. Excavations by Judith Carroll ahead of construction of the current car park uncovered the full medieval complexity of the rear plot: dense sequences of pits, hearths, and the slot-trenches left by timber buildings whose upright posts were set directly into sill-beams on the ground. Large dumps of metalworking waste pointed to the nearby common forge of the medieval town, six human burials may be connected to the early seventeenth-century Hospital of Our Blessed Saviour that stood just to the north, and the ceramic assemblage included imported wares from Saintonge, Ham Green, and Redcliffe alongside locally produced Kilkenny-type and Highhays Ware pottery, one group yielding a near-complete pot, cup, and jug. The excavation stopped at the formation level of the car park, meaning a significant portion of the medieval sequence remains untouched below the current structure.