As with many things, it depends on the army. Early medieval English armies are an interesting example; central to the military system were burghal defensive sites manned by members of the fyrd garrison. In tenth century Mercia, this network seems to have been underpinned by the burghal site at Stafford. Constructed by Æthelflæd in 914, the burh at Stafford had clear, deliniated areas dedicated to the wholesale production of pottery, bread and barley bannocks, and butchery. In essence, the centralised production of vast amounts of food and the vessels for its distribution and consumption.

The pottery is particularly important in this case because unlike other English kingdoms, Mercia is culturally aceramic prior to 914, and in fact remains so until much later in the tenth century. Stafford Ware usage thus appears to be part of state-managed production rather than the sudden onset of a sudden Mercian cultural fascination with ceramics. The trail of Stafford Ware sherd finds correlates closely with sites associated with the Mercian network of military and defensive sites - other burhs and sites with toponyms indicating watch stations or local strongholds. One example is Leintwardine in Shropshire, where the Anglo-Saxon settlement was built immediately adjacent to a Roman defensive enclosure which also housed the local church. Stafford Ware sherds were found inside this enclosure, suggesting that it and the church it enclosed acted as a site of temporary refuge manned by a garrison, and that this garrison was supplied by a centralised military logistical network so as to not place that burden of supply onto the local community.

This appears to have been the case across Mercia, where the need to place garrison forces in strategically important but remote locations and a general trend towards smaller and less productive settlements on more marginal land than lowland Wessex necessitated the imposition of a centralised logistical network to supply necessary garrison forces without imposing the strain of supply on a population less able to bear it.

In Wessex, and potentially more productive lowland areas of Mercia, the burhs and their fyrd garrisons were provisioned through a system known as the Burghal Hidage and noted in a document of that name discovered in the late 18th Century. Thought to have been written in the 910s, The Burghal Hidage lists all of the burhs in Wessex apart from those in Kent, and with the addition of two in Mercia. For each of these sites, the document gives a value of land in hides allotted to that burh for the provision of its garrison. The de facto West Saxon capital at Winchester was alloted 2,400 hides for example, while the smaller inland site at Shaftesbury was assigned 700, likely because the relatively local coastal site at Wareham was allotted 1,600.

Roughly equivalent to 120 acres (although this could differ very widely depending on terrain, land type, usage and productivity), a hide was deemed to be enough to provide for the defence of one 'pole' of wall (approx. 1.5m). With the average size of a smallhold farm or virgate for a household being roughly 30-40 acres, a hide could therefore provide for the 3-4 separate men of the fyrd necessary to man that 'pole' throughout the campaign season on a rotational basis.