What once stood here was not a parish institution or a monastic cell of the usual kind, but a frankhouse, a term referring to a property held freely and exempt from certain civic dues, belonging first to one of medieval Europe's most notorious military orders and then to another.

A charter of Edward I, dated 1292, formally granted the Knights Templar the right to maintain this frankhouse in the city, though the historian Hodkinson has noted that the document may simply have been recognising an arrangement already in place rather than establishing something new. The Knights Templar were a powerful religious and military order founded in the twelfth century, primarily associated with the Crusades; by the early fourteenth century they had been suppressed across Europe under pressure from the French crown and the papacy. When that suppression reached Ireland, their Limerick property passed to the Knights Hospitaller, another military-religious order founded in Jerusalem and the Templars' great rivals and successors in many of their possessions. The Hospitallers held the site until the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII brought their tenure to an end, after which it passed into the hands of the Brownes of Kenmare, a prominent Anglo-Irish family.

The site today is absorbed into the cathedral precinct, and there is no standing structure to identify it as distinct from its surroundings. Those who know where to look can orient themselves by the present cathedral entrance on Bridge Street and move slightly uphill from there, into the older body of the grounds. The cathedral itself, one of the most significant medieval buildings in Munster, provides useful context for the age and layering of this part of the city. There is no formal marker for the Templar or Hospitaller connection, which makes it the kind of place best approached with Hodkinson's research in hand rather than any expectation of signage.