Robert Dowdall


Sir Robert Dowdall was an Irish judge who held the office of Chief Justice of the Irish Common Pleas for more than forty years. He is mainly remembered today for the murderous assault on him by Sir James Keating, the Prior of Kilmainham, in 1462.

Career

He was the son of Luke Dowdall of County Louth. The Dowdalls were a Derbyshire family who originated at Dovedale, and came to Ireland in the thirteenth century. Later members of the family included George Dowdall, Archbishop of Armagh, James Dowdall, the Catholic martyr, and his cousin, also James Dowdall, Lord Chief Justice of Ireland.
He was appointed King's Serjeant in 1435 and Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas in 1438; he held that office until his death in 1482. He was Deputy Treasurer of Ireland in 1461 and was knighted the same year.
He married Anne Wogan of Rathcoffey, County Kildare, in 1454. He resided mainly at Clontarf near Dublin. He was a companion of the Brotherhood of Saint George, a short-lived military order founded by King Edward IV in 1474 for the defence of the Pale.

Attempted murder

Dowdall is chiefly remembered for the murderous assault on him in 1462 by Sir James Keating, Prior of the Knights Hospitallers. At Pentecost 1462, Dowdall, who was making a pilgrimage to a holy well near Kilmainham, County Dublin, was attacked by Keating with a sword and was put in fear of his life. There seems no reason to doubt that the Prior meant to kill him. Dowdall prosecuted Keating before the Irish Parliament, which found the Prior guilty of assault. He was fined £100, and ordered to pay Dowdall 100 marks as compensation, but was apparently able on technical grounds to evade making either payment.
The motive for the attack is unknown: Elrington Ball, comparing it to the murder of James Cornwalsh, Chief Baron of the Irish Exchequer, twenty years earlier, argued that crimes of violence were endemic medieval Ireland. However, equally savage crimes took place in contemporary England, such as the murder in 1455 of the respected lawyer Nicholas Radford by Thomas Courtenay, 6th Earl of Devon. Such incidents demonstrate a general breakdown of law and order in both kingdoms in the mid-fifteenth century, which greatly weakened the authority of the English Crown. Keating, despite his clerical office, was clearly a violent and turbulent individual, who dealt with an attempt to remove him as Prior by throwing his intended successor, Marmaduke Langley, into prison, where he died. He was disgraced many years later for his part in the attempt to put the pretender Lambert Simnel on the throne of England, and died in wretched poverty in about 1491.

Descendants

By his wife Anne Wogan, Robert had at least one son, Thomas Dowdall, Master of the Rolls in Ireland, through whom he was the ancestor of Archbishop George Dowdall and George's nephew James Dowdall, Lord Chief Justice of Ireland.