[1] He travelled widely in Europe, and after ordination he returned to England in 1698 to serve for a time on the English mission, before becoming chaplain to the Molyneux family at Mosborough Hall, Lancashire.
As it attacked the Jesuits, Father Thomas Hunter published his "Modest Defence" (1714), to which Dodd replied in The Secret Policy of the English Society of Jesus (1715).
From 1716 he was again at Mosborough till 1718, when he returned to Douay to collect materials for his magnum opus The Church History of England from 1500 to 1688, which occupied him for twenty years.
)[2] After many years' labour the Church History was completed in three folio volumes published in 1737, 1739, and 1742 at Wolverhampton, though for prudential reasons Brussels appears on the title-page.
Father John Constable, S.J., attacked the work as unfair to the Jesuits, and Dodd replied in An Apology for the Church History of English, published in 1742.