Editorial:

ON SEXTONS, WIDOW'S PORTIONS AND SPITE FENCES

Copyright © 2006 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.

E-mail this story to a friend

It's an old noun, with origins in Middle English and thence in Medieval Latin, so we were kind of surprised to find it in use in our own backyard. But there it was, right on our pages, a story about a sexton in Belgrade. That's where selectpersons are debating whether the person holding the job with the old-fashioned name should be elected or appointed.

What, you may wonder, does a sexton do? We wondered, too. Turns out that in Belgrade, they're the folks responsible for digging graves, keeping cemetery records, laying out burial lots and preparing those lots when necessary. In other words, the sexton deals with the needs of the dead. We know we're wrong, of course, but the name does conjure up for us images of a one-eyed, toothless, Thomas Hardy kind of character dressed in rough linsey-woolsey, carrying an ancient shovel and lurching about the town cemetery.

Evidently, the living survivors of those dead may have had a little trouble with past sextons, leading selectpersons to want -- in the delicate phrasing of one member -- "better service to the people who need the services." Thus the deliberation over whether Belgrade will get more accountability out of someone appointed by the town's governing body.

In any event, we're less intrigued by political dramas in Belgrade over how a sexton gets a job than we are by their antique name. And it reminds us of another antique custom still in play in Maine, in Damariscotta Mills, where an ancient law decrees that the widows of the town are entitled to a portion of the alewives harvested there every spring.

There's also the old state law, still in effect, about "spite fences" which provides criminal penalties for "any fence or other structure in the nature of a fence, unnecessarily exceeding 6 feet in height, maliciously kept and maintained for the purpose of annoying the owners or occupants of adjoining property." And another state law that says that "whoever on Memorial Day before 3:30 o'clock in the afternoon engages in any public outdoor game or sport where an admission is charged or collection is taken shall be punished by a fine of not more than $25 or by imprisonment for not more than 10 days, or by both." That should stop all those illicit morning bocce games on Memorial Day all over Maine.

We hope the fine leaders of Belgrade manage to figure out a modern way for their sexton to get the job -- but that they keep the colorful and historic name.