Mina
Marcelo Magallon»Meriadoc "Merry" Brandybuck, called The Magnificent, was a Hobbit, the son of Saradoc Brandybuck. [...] Saradoc "Scattergold" Brandybuck was a Hobbit and Master of Buckland.«
Seed 𓆏That's Pippin, not Merry, who’s labeled "quasi-royalty". It comes from him being the Shire-thain. Not sure it's exactly right to call him "royalty", though it's similar in a lot of ways. The position was literally called "Shire-king" in the past before the events of LOTR too.
Shire-thain
The Shire-thain,[1] also known as the Thain of the Shire, was the title given to the traditional military leader of the Hobbits in the Shire after the fall of Fornost and the Dúnedain Kingdom of Arthedain in the mid-Third Age. The Shire-thain was the master of the Shire-moot and the captain of the Shire-muster. The Hobbits first chose a Shire-thain to rule them in TA 1979 (Shire-reckoning 379), four years after Arvedui, last King of Arthedain, perished. Over time, the Shire-thain became a...
FoolishOwl@mina @pseudosage @mem @bruces Ah, I didn't realize that about the Took.
I was long frustrated that they never explain how Bilbo made his living before he goes off on an adventure. It's a detail I could ignore in The Hobbit, when we don't see anything of the Shire except Bilbo's house, but we do see gradations of status in LOTR. I figured Bilbo was probably sort of a minor gentry landlord, on the model of 19th century novels that are too "polite" to mention why the idle rich have money.
I remember from "the Hobbit" that the Baggins family was a well respected one (which usually means: of money).
I always believed that Bilbo was kind of a land owner, living from rent.