If a criminal or escaped suspect was at large, it was the sheriff’s responsibility to give the alarm - the hue and cry, as it was called. However, it remained the duty of every citizen to assist the sheriff in keeping the peace. Under King Alfred the Great, who assumed the throne in the year 871, the sheriff was responsible for maintaining law and order within his own county. The sheriff - in early England, and metaphorically, in present-day America - is the keeper, or chief, of the county. The word shire-reeve eventually became the modern English word sheriff. To distinguish the leader of a shire from the leader of a mere hundred, the more powerful official became known as a shire-reeve. Just as each hundred was led by a reeve (chief), each shire had a reeve as well. The shire was the forerunner of the modern county. A new unit of government, the shire, was formed when groups of hundreds banded together. The Anglo-Saxon word for chief was gerefa, which later became shortened to reeve.ĭuring the next two centuries, a number of changes occurred in this system of tithings and hundreds. Each group of ten tithings (or a hundred families) elected its own chief. The elected leader of each tithing was called a tithingman. Sometime before the year 700, they decided to systematize their methods of fighting by forming a system of local self-government based on groups of ten.Įach tun was divided into groups of ten families, called tithings. (Tun is the source of the modern English word town.) These Anglo-Saxons were often at war. More than twelve hundred years ago, the country we now call England was inhabited by small groups of Anglo-Saxons who lived in rural communities called tuns. To appreciate the vital function that sheriffs continue to serve, it is useful to become acquainted with the long and diverse history of the sheriff’s office, and how the office has grown and changed over the past twelve centuries.
And thank you for your service to your communities, to your country, and to the cause of law and justice.” Thank you for standing against those who would transform that dream into a nightmare of wrongdoing and lawlessness.
He said, “Thank you for standing up for this nation’s dream of personal freedom under the rule of law. The importance of the modern sheriff was stressed by President Ronald Reagan in his address to the National Sheriffs’ Association on June 21, 1984. Although the duties of the sheriff vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, the sheriff’s office is generally active in all three branches of the criminal justice system: law enforcement, the courts and corrections. With few exceptions, today’s sheriffs are elected officials who serve as a chief law-enforcement officer for a county. Most people would be surprised to know that the office of sheriff has a proud history that spans well over a thousand years, from the early Middle Ages to our own “high-tech” era.
Such is the power of old movies and television series, which have so magnified the role of the nineteenth-century American sheriff that it is now virtually impossible to think of sheriffs as existing in any other place or time. What is a sheriff? Mention the word “sheriff” and many people’s minds will fill immediately with images of shootouts and gunfights in the Wild West. Vehicle Equipment and Upfitting Procurement.Catastrophic Inmate Medical Insurance Plan.Statewide Misdemeanant Confinement Program.Administrative Assistant – Operations & Support Services.Administrative Assistant – Criminal Justice Programs.
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