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boasts they had made when drinking their lord’s mead in his hall, and ended with the challenge: ‘Now whoever is brave may prove it.’
    Needless to say this did not always happen in practice, as the history of Penda’s wars shows: one king after another died in battle with his armies, and in each case their followers fled. On at least one occasion, at Maserfelth, their lord’s body was left ignominiously on the field to be mutilated by the victors. As usual it was not the institution of the ‘hearth companions’ that mattered so much as the personal qualities of the men concerned, and a reference in Beowulf suggests that the ‘hall fellow’, a poser whose boasts in the mead hall were not backed up by action on the battlefield, was as well known in Anglo-Saxon England as in any other society.
    As the head of a court and a military retinue which were essentially unproductive in economic terms, a king had to secure supplies of food and other necessary goods from the farming population of the territory under his control. There were four main ways of doing this, all of which had a bearing on military strategy. Firstly, a ruler could travel around his kingdom and live for a while as a guest of each local community or magnate, effectively consuming his tax revenue at source. This sort of ‘royal progress’ remained popular until the end of the Middle Ages, and it had the advantage of providing a king’s subjects with direct access to him in return for their expenditure. However, it has been argued that even in the seventh century the economy of most of England, and the condition of its roads, were not so primitive as to make this necessary (Kirby). The widely separated localities from which charters were issued prove that kings did travel, on campaign and for other reasons, but they probably did not have to do so in search of subsistence. Instead there is already evidence for the existence of royal estates, often indicated by the place name suffix ‘-tun’; these served as local administrative centres and collection points for food rents, which could either be consumed on the estate or forwarded elsewhere. There is evidence that these estates were often fortified, and although at first they are unlikely to have consisted of more than a palisaded earth bank around a wooden hall, the history of the Mercian Wars shows that these could be of considerable strategic significance.
    Outside the areas which were firmly under a king’s control there might be a wide belt of territory in which his power was at least grudgingly recognised, and taxation (or rather tribute) was collected in the form of livestock, especially cattle, transported ‘on the hoof’ to the central regions. This, it has been argued, was seen as a humiliating relationship because those who contributed their cattle received nothing in return, except perhaps nominal protection from raiding. They would therefore be the first to break away if the king died or suffered a serious reverse on the battlefield. In fact the distinction between the collection of this tribute and a violent cattle raid was not always clear. A poem in praise of Cadwallon, the early seventh-century king of Gwynedd in North Wales, says that his cattle ‘have not bellowed before the spear points’ of King Edwin’s Northumbrians, meaning that he has asserted his independence and not allowed them to be taken away (T. Charles-Edwards, in Bassett).
    Finally, in the outermost zone surrounding the kingdom, were hostile but weaker states which could be simply raided, their possessions looted and their animals driven off. In a subsistence economy in which food supplies were always precarious, these beasts could themselves be an important strategic resource. Although our sources never describe it specifically, we can imagine a continuous one-way movement of cattle into Mercia from those neighbouring kingdoms which were at least