the other as that of a county in Maine. At an earlier date,
merchants of Bristol and Shrewsbury had become interested in this part
of New England and had sent over one Edward Hilton, who some time before
1627 began a settlement at Dover. The share of the Bristol merchants was
purchased in 1633 by the English lords and gentlemen already concerned
in the Connecticut settlement, for the purpose, it may be, of furnishing
another refuge in New England, should conditions at home demand their
withdrawal overseas. But nothing came of their purchase except an
unfortunate controversy with Plymouth colony over trading boundaries on
the Kennebec.

The men established on this northern frontier were often lawless and
difficult to control, of loose habits and morals, and intent on their
own profit; and the region itself was inhospitable to organized and
settled government. Yet out of these somewhat nebulous beginnings, four
settlements arose--Portsmouth (Masonian and Anglican), Dover (Anglican
and Puritan), Exeter and Hampton (both Puritan), each with its civil
compact and each an independent town. The inhabitants were few in
number, and "the generality, of mean and low estates," and little
disposed to union among themselves. But in 1638-1639, when Massachusetts
discovered that one interpretation of her charter would carry her
northern boundary to a point above them, she took them under her
protecting wing. After considerable debate this jurisdiction was
recognized and the New Hampshire and Maine towns were brought within
her boundaries. Henceforth, for many years a number of these towns,
though in part Anglican communities and never burdened with the
requirement that their freemen be church members, were represented in
the general court at Boston. Nevertheless the Mason and Gorges
adherents--whose Anglican and pro-monarchical sympathies were hostile to
Puritan control and who were supported by the persistent efforts of the
Mason family in England--were able to obtain the separation of New
Hampshire from Massachusetts in 1678. Maine, however, remained a part of
the Bay Colony to the end of the colonial period.

The circumstances attending the settlement of New Haven were wholly
unlike those of New Hampshire. John Davenport, a London clergyman of an
extreme Puritan type, Theophilus Eaton, a London merchant in the Baltic
trade and a member of the Eastland Company, Samuel Eaton and John
Lathrop, two nonconforming ministers, were the lea