I can give you one very specific answer! Specifically I call tell you about tenth century Mercia during the Viking wars and the unification of England.

The Cerdicing kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia in the ninth and tenth century had adopted a network of fortified burh sites throughout their territories as an integral part of their successful defence against Viking invasion. These sites had standing garrisons from the local fyrd militia, and each burh had a certain number of 'hides' attached to it which were tithed to provide for the men of the garrison who were of course unable to tend their own lands while away. The amount of land allocated to each burh in Wessex was denoted in a surviving document called The Burghal Hidage. The campaign season ended in approximately August, so that the garrisons could return home to carry out the harvest, and resumed in the spring after the sowing and lambing season.

Mercia took this system one further, quite possibly as a result of Æthelflæd's education in Roman systems and her projection on Romanitas. Archaeological evidence has shown us that, unlike the rest of England, Anglo-Saxon Mercia was almost entirely aceramic. For some reason, pottery usage just doesn't appear to have caught on in Mercia. The once exception is a highly distinctive and uniform type called Stafford Ware, which as the name suggests was manufactured in a specialised pottery district within the Æthelflædan burh at Stafford from 914, quite likely designed by Æthelflæd herself and very clearly based on earlier Roman Trent Valley Ware manufactured in the same region.

The find sites for Stafford Ware sherds correlate closely with other known Mercian burhs, and known defensive sites with tot or weard toponyms denoting watch sites or defensive strongholds. At the site of Leintwardine in Shropshire, for example, sherds have been found inside a defensive enclosure around the Church. The rest of the Anglo-Saxon settlement lay outside this perimeter, and so the enclosure appears to have been a host to a garrison and otherwise accessed only during Church services or as a refuge during times of crisis.

At Stafford itself, Carver's excavations in the 1970s found clear evidence of highly specialised areas for the mass production of Stafford Ware cups, bowls and storage jugs/amphoræ, a bakery district with large ovens capable of baking several hundred loaves and oat bannocks a day, and a butchery district where spoil heaps show evidence of the mass preparation of beef.

As opposed to Wessex, where the majority of Burhs were surrounded by large villages, or were themselves significant population centres, the geography of Mercia meant that in many areas, the villages tended to be smaller and less agriculturally productive, and several burhs were situated in strategically important but otherwise relatively isolated locations. The burh at Stafford seems to have been an active response to this, and the site seems to have functioned as a centralised supply hub which produced both food and storage and then distributed these along the rivers and Roman roads to the various garrison sites across Mercia.