fence viewer

plural fence viewers

1. A town or city official who administers fence laws by inspecting new fences and settles disputes arising from trespass by livestock that had escaped enclosure.

   1 more example

   But what villager could have foreseen that their neighbor was to be commissioner for the government of Massachusetts, church elder, town selectman, judge of small causes, and town deputy to the Massachusetts legislature? The people of Weyhill [in Hampshire, England], who had seen Peter Noyes serve as juryman in their manorial court and churchwarden of their church on the hill, could have predicted that he would do well as land surveyor, road building director, grantor of timber, and fence viewer. They would have been amazed, however, and so would Noyes himself, if someone had told him, in 1638, that during the next twenty years he was to attend one hundred and twenty-nine separate official meetings in his town, to say nothing of the informal church gatherings, church services, and sessions of the Massachusetts legislature.

   1963, Sumner Chilton Powell, “Chapter I: The Web of Open-field Life”, in Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town, Wesleyan University Press