The plans of St Stephen's college reproduced here (plan 2, frontispiece) are an attempt at setting out the boundaries of the plots allotted to the dean and canons of the college in the late fourteenth century. They are in the form of an overlay based on a modern Ordnance Survey map, allowing the buildings to be accurately related to the present layout of the area. The dean and canons’ plots lay at some distance from the college's main buildings, and their precise position has not previously been established, unlike those of the chapel and cloister, which have partially survived. This new analysis is based on a compositio sealed in August 1394, an agreement between the college and the abbot and monks of Westminster abbey, clarifying the outcome of a lawsuit in the Roman curia over jurisdiction, tithes, burial fees, and other matters (appendix 3). The document provides detailed measurements of the areas formerly under the abbey's jurisdiction and now forming part of the college, dimensions being expressed in some cases to the nearest half inch. The location of the vicars’ houses is also shown on the plan, and for the sake of completeness so are the core buildings of the college on the east side of Westminster hall.

The canons’ houses were to be built on the former ‘close’ (‘clausura’) of the earl of Kent, situated between New Palace Yard and an estate called the ‘Almaigne’ (from Alemannia, ‘Germany’), which had formerly belonged to the earl of Cornwall, king of the Romans. The canons’ ‘estate or ground’ (‘fundus seu solum’) was defined as lying between four limits. On the north side a ditch separated the area from the ‘Almaigne’, and this appears to have returned southwards as the ‘king's ditch’. The southern boundary was a ‘long stone wall’ from the Thames which ‘passed through the clocktower’ (‘transit per campanile’) and abutted ‘the gate by the staple house now called the weigh house’ at the west end. This gate, built in 1287–89, was the predecessor of the great north-west gateway of New Palace Yard, a reconstruction of 1397–99, a few years after the compositio was drawn up. The eastern boundary was a ‘great stone wall’ on the Thames waterfront, and the western limit was another ‘long stone wall newly constructed’, which was interrupted by the entrance gateway to the close.