Archbishop Heinrich I von Müllenark gave the property to the cathedral chapter sometime before his death in 1238, designating it a canon's residence — the kind of house only a senior cleric of the diocese could occupy. The first known resident was the canon Herimann von Heppendorf, who died in 1257, and through his mother Agnes von Linnep the house's eventual name began its slow approach. For decades the building passed between members of the Reifferscheid family, all of them named some variation of Heinrich, all of them serving as canons of Cologne, all of them living in the cathedral's literal shadow. The Hof was an emphyteusis — a kind of perpetual hereditary lease — which meant the cathedral chapter never really gave it away, only loaned it across centuries.

The Hof's residents tilted increasingly grand. In 1397 Wilhelm von Sombreffe handed it to Gottfried, lord of Heinsberg and Count of Chiny; a year later Gottfried sold it to the sub-dean Johannes II of Linnep, prior of St. Gereon, and from then on the building carried his family's name. In July 1477 it found itself momentarily at the centre of European dynastic politics. The Trier Archbishop Johann II of Baden, who was acting as envoy to the future Emperor Maximilian I, was staying in the house in Cologne at the same time Maximilian himself was arriving for his betrothal to Mary of Burgundy. Four days after taking up residence in the Linneper Hof, Archbishop Johann signed a coinage agreement with the electors of Mainz, the Palatinate, and Jülich. A few hundred square metres of cathedral-quarter real estate had briefly become a chamber of the Holy Roman Empire.

Not every story inside these walls was about princes. In 1534 the cathedral chapter rented the house — misspelled in the lease as the Lenneper — to a Cologne burgher named Mathias Vorsbach, who moved in with his wife Jutta von Lachem and his children. Vorsbach was a quiet kind of dissident in a city where dissent could be lethal. From 1551 onward he was prosecuted for refusing to baptise his child as an infant, a defining demand of Anabaptist conscience. He died in prison in Brühl, just south of Cologne, six years later. His widow lived on for another half-century. The cathedral, meanwhile, continued to draw its rent from a house whose tenant had been killed by the cathedral's own theology.

In 1747 and 1748 the Roman Catholic Archdiocese bought the Linneper Hof from the cathedral chapter, paying to clear ground for the architect Michael Leveilly's new Cologne Seminary, finished by 1748. The seminary itself was relocated in 1827, and the building lingered until 1864, when demolition crews finally erased the last walls. For nearly a century afterward there was just open space here at the edge of the Domhof. Then archaeologists found a Roman mosaic floor only a metre or two beneath the surface, and in 1974 the Romano-Germanic Museum opened above it. The site that once held a 700-year-old aristocratic residence now displays a Dionysian floor laid down by Cologne's first occupiers, the Romans. Layer over layer over layer — Cologne, telling its own story in stratigraphy.