Between 1352 and 1355 Edward III erected lodgings for the whole community of canons and priest vicars serving his newly established college of St George. These were squeezed around a courtyard between the 12th-century great hall of Henry II's palace, now given over to the college for its own use, and the Dean's Cloister. The lodgings were built in timber-frame and were arranged on two stories, the upper jettied out over the lower to create an internal cloister walk at ground level. There must originally have been about twenty-six sets of chambers within the cloister. It has been suggested that those on the upper floor served to house the canons and the lower their juniors, the priest vicars.

Remarkably, much of the medieval timber framing for these medieval lodgings has survived to the present day, though it is now obscured in many places by a host of later extensions and adaptations. The cloister is probably the earliest surviving example of timber framed collegiate architecture in Britain and continues as the home of the canons to the present day.