Joseph Hull
Rev. Joseph Hull led a congregation of 104 from England to Massachusetts in 1635. He founded the Cape Cod town of Barnstable in 1639 and served as one of Maine’s earliest ministers. Hull's willingness to preach without approval from church officials and his efforts to chart a middle course between Anglicans and Puritans resulted in repeated conflicts with religious and colonial authorities.
England: 1596–1635
Baptized on 25 April 1596, Joseph Hull was the youngest son of yeoman Thomas Hull and Joane Peson of Crewkerne, Somerset. He began his studies at St. Mary's College, Oxford, on 22 May 1612 and earned a bachelor's degree on 14 November 1614. He was ordained as a deacon by Bishop William Cotton of Exeter on 23 May 1619 in the , Silverton, Devon, and was appointed rector of St. Giles' Church, Northleigh, Devon, on 28 March 1622. He would serve the parish 11 years.Hull's first wife, whose name is unknown, died during or soon after the birth of her seventh child in 1632. Hull married Agnes in St. Cuthbert's Church, Wells on 13 March 1633 and resigned at North Leigh the following day. In April, he began working as a curate in the Broadway Parish, Somerset. Hull's decision to return to his native Somerset might have ensured relatives were available to support Agnes, then 23, as she became stepmother to a large family of young children.
Throughout his career, Hull refused to allow those in "ecclesiastical authority over him" to dictate when and where he could minister. In September 1629, wardens of the Crewkerne parish had been cited for allowing Hull and two other ministers to preach without license and without registration in the parish's Book of Strange Preachers. In January 1635, Hull reportedly preached in Glastonbury, “saying that judgment hung over the land and that first it would fall on the clergy and then the laity.” That same month, he was prosecuted for preaching without license. Hull failed to respond to the charges, and in February 1635, he was expelled from the Church of England. Before the end of the following month, the 40-year-old minister had gathered a congregation of 104 and set sail for New England.
Massachusetts Bay: 1635–1639
The Hull Company left Weymouth, Dorset, on 20 March 1635. Among them were a chandler, clothier, and cooper, eight husbandmen, twelve servants, two tailors, a salter, and a weaver. The Hulls were accompanied by three servants, the most for a single family. Hull signed the passenger list “boldly” as “Joseph Hull, Minister,” unlike many Puritan pastors who emigrated under assumed names.The group arrived in Dorchester, Massachusetts, on 7 June 1635, fifteen years after Pilgrims established Plymouth Plantation and five years after Puritans founded the Bay Colony, seeking the freedom to practice their religion without fear of persecution, a liberty they would not grant to others. On 8 July 1635, John Winthrop noted in his journal, “At this court Wessagusset was made a plantation and Mr. Hull, a minister of England, and twenty-one families with him allowed to sit down there.”
Native Wessagusset had been “nearly depopulated” by the Great Dying, beginning in 1616 when contact with early Europeans sparked waves of infectious disease for which Americans had no immunity. Tens of thousands died in the nations between today's southern Maine and Rhode Island. For King James, it was a “wondrous plague” that allowed the English to appropriate vast tracts of land—including cultivated acres and buildings—without purchase. In 1634, Winthrop observed, “For the natives, they are near all dead of the smallpox, so the Lord hath cleared our title to what we possess.” On 2 September 1635, the General Court in Boston changed the name of Wessagusset to Weymouth after the Hull Company's port of departure and made Hull a freeman. He received the town's largest land grant on 12 June 1636.
The village had a small English population when the Hull Company arrived. Some had been among the first successful settlers in 1623. Under the leadership of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, these colonists were more theologically liberal than the Puritans who joined them beginning in 1630. If Hull “hoped to bridge the gap between Anglicans and Puritans,” he found his efforts rejected by both sides. From 1635 until 1644, “there was almost constant tumult and disturbance” in the village, “sometimes so serious as to draw the attention of the General Court.” “The agitations showed themselves principally in the church and upon ecclesiastical matters.”
“Dissention quickly arose” between Hull and the village's Puritans, likely “instigated by the authorities outside,” and, in less than a year, they had called Rev. Thomas Jenner to be their pastor. At the same time, Hull's willingness to adopt a Puritan practice caused “tension” with Weymouth's traditional Anglicans. Like nearly all Massachusetts ministers, he required prospective congregants to give a “testimony of spiritual experience” before they could join the church and have access to the sacraments. When new emigrant Rev. Robert Lenthall agreed to make baptism the only “door to the church,” some Weymouth residents asked him to join them. Yet another minister, Rev. Samuel Newman, was soon “summoned to heal the breach.” Thus, by 1637, “there were no less than four claimants for the Weymouth pulpit, each with a strong party at his command.”
In 1637, Hull “relinquished his charge and withdrew.” After “a brief season of preaching at Bass River, now Beverly, he gave up his ministerial labor.” Moving to adjoining Hingham, he was granted a five-acre house lot and 45 acres which he used to graze cattle. The ecclesiastic chaos had not cost him “the confidence of his fellow townsmen.” He was appointed a local magistrate in 1638 and was elected to serve as the settlement's Deputy to the General Court on 7 September 1638 and 13 March 1639. Hull's years in the Bay Colony ended when he received permission from Plymouth to found a colonial settlement on Cape Cod. He delivered a “farewell sermon,” likely in Hingham, on 5 May 1639.
Cape Cod: 1639–1641
To encourage development and defense, colonial officials granted large swaths of Native land to their fellow Englishmen. The Cape Cod village of Mattakeese was prized for its soil's “adaptation to the raising of grain, much of the land being already cleared by the Indians” who had long “successfully cultivated it.” When the original English grantee failed to establish a settlement, Plymouth eradicated his claim and granted the land to Hull and Thomas Dimmock, who led the first group of colonists to Mattakeese in May 1639. They changed the name of the village and established the town of Barnstable in June. Hull and Dimmock held nearly all offices and shared the responsibility of parceling house lots and acreage. “No appeal from their decisions was ever made,” and they “seemed to possess the entire confidence of the people."In October, a large influx of families arrived under the leadership of Rev. John Lothrop after their church in Scituate split in a controversy over baptism. In December, Hull and Dimmock were elected as Barnstable's Deputies to the General Court. On 11 December 1639, a service of thanksgiving and a feast were held at Hull's house. Communal praise quickly gave way to “controversy,” which “turned primarily on the conflicting loyalties and interests of the people who had come to Barnstable from different places.” Hull and his followers founded the town, but the Scituate settlers brought “a population large enough to support a congregation, and Lothrop expected to be its minister.”
Ideally, each Puritan church would have two ministers who led worship and administered sacraments: a pastor and a teacher. In Barnstable, neither role went to Hull. Lothrop served as pastor, and on 15 April 1640, Rev. John Mayo was invested as the church's teaching elder when “Mr. Hull and brother Cobb” joined Lothrop in the ritual of laying on hands. Denied a role in ministry, Hull was also “dropped from his position as deputy” to the colony court. In 1640, only a year after founding Barnstable, “Hull does not appear to have held any office.” Without a ministerial salary, he again turned to “agriculture, especially the ranging of cattle and horses for market.”
Early in 1641, residents of neighboring Yarmouth asked him to establish a second church in their settlement. In Puritan practice, members pledged not to leave a church without the consent of its ministers and congregation. Hull accepted Yarmouth's call without obtaining this consent, just as he had accepted invitations to preach in England without obtaining permission from Anglican authorities.
“Hull was in trouble from the beginning.” Apparently in retaliation, he was sued by a number of men in Lothrop's congregation for trespass or debt, but Lothrop himself wielded the biggest weapon. Under his leadership, the Barnstable Church excommunicated Hull on 1 May 1641 “for his willful breaking of communion with us and joining himself a member with a company in Yarmouth to be their Pastor; contrary to the advice and Counsel of our Church.” Lothrop didn't limit his vengeance to Hull. Some of Hull’s Barnstable friends and former congregants joined him in Yarmouth. Lothrop's register “records a number of excommunications of its members, far more than one would expect, and for reasons which hint of retribution.” Hull's wife Agnes experienced “the same stern discipline.”
A ”dreaded censure,” excommunication held “great weight since excommunicated church members could not participate in communion, … bringing with it the terrifying consequence of eternal damnation.” In Puritan practice, if individuals were “duly” excommunicated from one congregation, they were deemed “unfit” to be members of any congregation. However, “each church reserved to itself the right to make trial of each case of excommunication,” and if it determined another church had proceeded wrongly, “it could hold communion with an excommunicate.” Individuals censured by Barnstable could thus receive the sacrament from Hull in Yarmouth.
“When Lothrop's spate of excommunications had no perceptible effect, the power of the civil magistrates was invoked.” On 8 March 1642, Plymouth Colony ordered that “a warrant shall be directed to the constable of Yarmouth, to apprehend Mr. Joseph Hull, to bring him before the next magistrate, to find sufficient sureties for his appearance the next General Court, to answer his doings." “o allegation of immorality or unsoundness of doctrine” was ever made against Hull, “but he was dealt with as rigorously as if there had been.”
The warrant appears to have disbanded Hull's congregation, cutting its members off from communion. Agnes Hull was pregnant with her fourth child during the turmoil, and the Hull family knew all too well the mortal dangers of childbirth. On 11 March 1642, she returned to the Barnstable Church, “renouncing” her decision to join the Yarmouth congregation and “confessing her evil in so doing with sorrow,” according to Lothrop's note in the parish register.
Hull had likely continued his agricultural work while preaching in Yarmouth. But by spring 1642, the “New England economy was turning downward.” Cattle bought at £10 a head in 1640 could not be sold for £5 in 1642, and Hull's livestock business “collapse.” Banned from ministry in Massachusetts, Hull left his wife and children in Barnstable and travelled north, seeking work in Maine.