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- He was a butcher.
Robert Fuller and his wife Sarah Dunkhorn are generally accepted as the parents of Mayflower passengers Edward and Dr. Samuel Fuller, who were definitely brothers, but the case for this parentage is not overwhelmingly strong.
From "Was Matthew Fuller of Plymouth Colony a Son of Pilgrim Edward Fuller?" by Bruce Campbell MacGunnigle, Robert M. Sherman, and Robert S. Wakefield, The American Genealogist 61:194, 1985:
Pilgrims Edward and Samuel Fuller came to Plymouth MA in 1620 on the Mayflower and have been accepted as sons of Robert Fuller of Redenhall, co. Norfolk, England (NEHGR 55:410-416). The two major pieces of evidence leading to this conclusion are the baptisms of Edward and Samuel to Robert Fuller, butcher, at Redenhall in 1575 and 1580, and the will of Robert Fuller, of the parish of Redenhall, yeoman, dated and proved in 1614. In his will Robert named wife Frances, son-in-law John Spaulding, and son Thomas; he gave son Edward a "tenement” and £20, son Samuel £15, daughter Ann Fuller £20, daughter Elizabeth Fuller £40, daughter Mary Fuller £40, and "grandson John Fuller, son of my son John Fuller" £5 for his apprenticeship (NEHGR 55:415-416).
Is this sufficient to prove that the Mayflower Fullers were from Redenhall? The names Edward and Samuel were not uncommon and there was no known child named Robert in the early generations of descendants of those two Pilgrims. Their presumed father, Robert of Redenhall, was called butcher in the parish registers. Thomas Morton, writing in New English Canaan (Amsterdam 1637), said Samuel Fuller was brought up a butcher, and was a native of Wrington in Somerset; but when Samuel married Agnes Carpenter at Leiden, Holland, in 1613 they were recorded as "sayworker from London" and "spinster from Wrington" (MD 8:129-130). Robert Fuller, living in a small Norfolk town, gave no indication in his will that son Samuel was in Holland; Samuel of Plymouth Colony was a physician of sorts, an elder of the church, and seems to have been an educated man.
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