A Catholic church stands on the site today, but the land it occupies has been in continuous religious use since the early thirteenth century, and the medieval friary that once spread across this neighbourhood left behind a graveyard of remarkable extent, one that kept turning up its dead long after the city had built itself over them.

The friary was founded by Ralph le Porter before around 1233, when Henry III authorised a grant of 20 marks to the Friars Minor of Dublin, the Franciscan order established just a few decades earlier by Francis of Assisi, for repairs to their church and houses. Further royal payments followed in 1270. In 1308, John le Decer, a former Mayor of Dublin, funded the construction of a chapel of St. Mary on the site. By 1340, an extent of the friary recorded a church, cloister, cemetery, and associated buildings. The Dissolution of the Monasteries brought that chapter to a close; the friars left, the buildings passed to secular use, and in 1541 the site was granted to a man named Thomas Stephens. The name Francis Street, however, quietly preserved the memory of what had been there.

The archaeology has been the real revelation. Excavations in the 1980s exposed around 30 skeletons, and in 1994 archaeologist Alan Hayden excavated 84 burials at numbers 34 to 36 Francis Street, associated with medieval pottery and floor tiles, among them fragments of mid-thirteenth-century decorated tilework. Analysis of remains uncovered at Davis Place in 2000 by Laureen Buckley identified juveniles, adolescents, and adults of both sexes, suggesting a cross-section of the community associated with the friary rather than an exclusively monastic burial ground. The site is not marked or interpreted for visitors in any formal way, but the church on Francis Street occupies the core of the original precinct, and the street itself traces the outline of a medieval world that continues, incrementally, to surface.