Law and Institutions
in the Shire
 

So far as the archaic Shire may have approached statehood, it did so primarily through its military organization. The office of the Thain refers (Letters, Carpenter 1981, letter #183) to the "half republic, half aristocracy of the Shire," and this is a fair summary: an archaic system of institutions based on the folklands and their chieftains coexisted with a somewhat republican system based on the Mayor and the two attached offices of Postmaster and First Shirriff, under which titles the Mayor managed the Messenger Service and the Watch.

This organization, too, was a rather minimal state, along the lines that Thomas Jefferson favored. Tolkien says (Tolkien, 1965, p.31):

The Shirriffs were the name that the Hobbits gave to their police, or the nearest equivalent that they possessed. They had, of course, no uniforms (such things being quite unknown), only a feather in their caps; and they were in practice rather haywards than policemen, more concerned with the strayings of beasts than of people. There were in all the Shire only twelve of them, three in each Farthing, for Inside Work. A rather larger body varying at need, was employed to 'beat the bounds', and to see that Outsiders of any kind, great or small, did not make themselves a nuisance.

Tolkien also notes that the messengers were more numerous and busier than the Shirriffs.

This second state formation appears to have grown in fact out of the needs of trade and commerce, that is, out of the Shire's involvement in a market economy. This in turn had two aspects: the growth of a market within the Shire, one where for example it was possible to speculate in pipeweed, and the growth of economic relations between the Shire and other peoples, especially the dwarves of the Blue Mountains who travelled along the Great East Road. The Shire even had an export commodity in pipeweed, one which brought in many of the troubles that our century has inflicted on Third World countries that produce agricultural or mineral products for export.

We must also note another significant fact about the Shire: a large part of its populace could read and write, and carried on extensive written communications which gave the Messenger Service its business. In fact literacy was deeply embedded into the laws of the Shire, which recognized such concepts as the Will, a written expression of a decedent's wishes about his property, and prescribed traditional forms for legal documents — Tolkien mentions "seven signatures of witnesses in red ink" (Tolkien, 1965, p.66). So writing was a long established part of Shire customs. Now, writing and reckoning and such skills naturally accompany the growth of a market economy, as they make it possible to keep records and to determine profit and loss of enterprises and to exchange over a wider area than one can personally visit regularly. So, here too, we have evidence of a society well on the way to modernity.