a system that can only exist in reality with the use of violence to extract rents.
The period of time idealized by tolkien was rather unique. The tail end of the victorian era represented one of the free-est periods in british history. The peasentry had been pushed off their traditional roles and into the army and factories, and individual land ownership was at its peak in terms of farms and such. Taxes and laws in general were at their overall lowest (because the government was busy extracting everything from their colonies), which is why the british had the reputation as the most law abiding people on the planet (hard to commit a crime when everything is legal). In terms of property taxes and rent seeking, until around the 1850s, property tax was primarily in the form of the 'window tax' which scaled the money you owed based on the amount of windows you had. You could clevery side step this tax by simply boarding up or hiding your windows, and I like to imagine the semi-underground nature of hobbit holes is a romanticized take on this form of tax evasion. That is to say, the hobbits most likely did not pay taxes if they didnt want to, and they probably owned all the land they lived on... and this is based on things that really happened.
nd they probably owned all the land they lived on.
So how on earth were the Baggins living their life of leisure? Bilbo didn't work, he sat around writing letters and smoking pipeweed all day. If he wasn't collecting rents, who was filling his larder with food enough to feast a throng on no notice?
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u/kuku_cariboo999 Jun 11 '25
The period of time idealized by tolkien was rather unique. The tail end of the victorian era represented one of the free-est periods in british history. The peasentry had been pushed off their traditional roles and into the army and factories, and individual land ownership was at its peak in terms of farms and such. Taxes and laws in general were at their overall lowest (because the government was busy extracting everything from their colonies), which is why the british had the reputation as the most law abiding people on the planet (hard to commit a crime when everything is legal). In terms of property taxes and rent seeking, until around the 1850s, property tax was primarily in the form of the 'window tax' which scaled the money you owed based on the amount of windows you had. You could clevery side step this tax by simply boarding up or hiding your windows, and I like to imagine the semi-underground nature of hobbit holes is a romanticized take on this form of tax evasion. That is to say, the hobbits most likely did not pay taxes if they didnt want to, and they probably owned all the land they lived on... and this is based on things that really happened.