♂Joseph Hull

Joseph Hull^W (baptised 24 April 1596 – 19 November 1665) was a clergyman from Somerset who led a company of West Country families to Massachusetts in 1635 and spent the rest of his life moving between pulpits in New England and Cornwall. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Temperance Hull (baptised 1625). Soon after they landed, he and the twenty-one families who came with him were allowed to settle at Wessaguscus, which was renamed Weymouth.

Early life and English ministry

Joseph was baptized at Crewkerne, in Somerset, England, on 24 April 1596, a son of Thomas Hull and Joan Pyssing. He matriculated at St Mary Hall, Oxford^W, on 22 May 1612, aged 17, and took his degree on 14 November 1614. After serving as teacher and curate at Colyton, in Devon, he was rector of Northleigh, in the diocese of Exeter, from 1621 until he resigned in 1632. His daughter Temperance was baptized at Northleigh in 1625.

In 1633 and 1634 he was curate at Broadway, in Somerset, and several of the families in his care there went with him to New England. The name of his first wife is not known. By 1635 he was married to Agnes, then 25, who was most likely his second wife.

Weymouth

A ship sailed from Weymouth, in Dorset, in the spring of 1635 with 106 passengers, many of them from Broadway and Batcombe in Somerset. At the head of its list was “Joseph Hall of Somerset a minister aged 40 years”, with his wife Agnes, three servants and seven children, Temperance, then nine, among them. The company reached Boston on 5 May. On 8 July John Winthrop^W noted that Wessaguscus had been made a plantation, and “Mr. Hull, a minister in England, and twenty-one families with him, allowed to sit down there - after called Weymouth”. On 2 September Hull and four men from the same ship were admitted freemen^W of the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, a sign that a church had already been gathered among them, and he is counted the first minister of the Weymouth church.

Dissension soon came, even within his own church. By 1636 he was living at Hingham, and he sat as a deputy in the General Court in September 1638 and March 1639 while still serving Weymouth. Late in 1637 an attempt had begun to put Thomas Jenner in his place, and Hull preached at Weymouth for the last time in May 1639.

Barnstable and Yarmouth

That year he went to Barnstable, on Cape Cod, which Plymouth Colony^W did not yet count as one of its towns. On 3 December 1639 he and several others were admitted freemen of the colony, and they were joined at Barnstable by John Lothrop^W and his followers. Hull sat as a deputy for Barnstable, and sold land there to Samuel Hinckley; when the town took part of it, the quarrel went to the colony’s court, which settled it in 1642.

In 1641 he moved on to Yarmouth, and for leaving Barnstable he was excommunicated by its church. The breach was partly healed in March 1643, when he and his wife were received back into the Barnstable church.

Maine and Cornwall

By May 1643 Hull was at York, in the Province of Maine^W, and Winthrop called him “an excommunicated person and very contentious”. In July 1645 he and Agnes witnessed a deed of Henry Simpson, and he alone witnessed Simpson’s will on 18 March 1646/7. He then went back to England, apparently leaving all but his youngest children behind. In 1652 he was at Launceston, in Cornwall, as “Mr. Joseph Hull, minister”, and about ten years later he was ejected from the rectory of Buryan, in the same county.

Last years

Hull returned to his children at Oyster River, in Dover, New Hampshire, where Temperance lived with her husband, John Bickford. He later lived at the Isles of Shoals, and the islands owed him £20 when he died on 19 November 1665, probably there. Administration of his estate was granted to his widow, Agnes, and the chief item in the inventory was “His books £10”.

Notes

Sources for his life

His career is drawn from the Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire by Noyes, Libby and Davis, which cites the Maine probate and court records, and from Robert Charles Anderson’s Great Migration Newsletter, which cites Winthrop’s journal, the Massachusetts Bay records and the printed passenger list, and summarizes Anderson’s “Notes on the Reverend Joseph Hull of Weymouth and Barnstable, Massachusetts, and York, Maine”, The American Genealogist 68 (1993), page 149. That note is the source for the curacy at Broadway in 1633 and 1634 and for Temperance’s baptism in the bishop’s transcript for Northleigh. The newsletter’s view that the Weymouth church was gathered in 1635, with Hull as its first minister, is an argument from the freemen’s admissions; the church’s formal organization is usually dated 1639. That he left his older children behind when he went to England is the dictionary’s own inference (“app.”).

Baptism and parentage

The baptism of 24 April 1596 and the parents Thomas Hull and Joan Pyssing come from a Hull family-society typescript, “The Hull Line”, which follows John Insley Coddington’s “The Pyssing Ancestry of the Hulls of New England”. The dictionary also makes him a son of Thomas and Joanna (Peson) Hull of Crewkerne. Anderson’s Great Migration Begins (page 1042) makes the New Haven settler George Hull his brother. His age, 17 at Oxford in May 1612 and 40 on the passenger list of 1635, points to a birth a year or so before the baptism.

His wives

The typescript, quoting Coddington, suggests that he married his first wife, whose name is not known, about 1619, and rejects the often-repeated claim that she was Joanna Coffin. Agnes was 25 in 1635, and the spacing of the children’s ages on the passenger list (from 15 down to 3) suggests that she was a second wife; on that reckoning she cannot have been the mother of Temperance, who was born about 1625.

The passenger list

The list, printed by Hotten and dated at Weymouth 20 March 1635, writes his name “Joseph Hall”; Anderson identifies him as Joseph Hull, since he and four other men on the list were made freemen of Massachusetts Bay together on 2 September 1635.

His death

The date of death is the dictionary’s; it gives no place, saying only that he was later at the Isles of Shoals and that the islands owed him £20 at his death. The typescript says he died “supposedly” at the Isles of Shoals.