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Divide and rule? The military infrastructure of eighth-and ninth-century Mercia S  B  Military might is widely recognized as having been a key element in the Mercian kings' ability to forge and maintain a large kingdom in midland England in and after the seventh century. The paper argues that its basis was a network of fortified places -all major royal settlements that were given substantial defences in the eighth and early ninth centuries -and a systemic mechanism for manning them. The archaeological evidence of these defences at Hereford, Tamworth and Winchcombe is reviewed; the probable locations of other such early fortified places in midland England are considered; and the significance of this burghal system for our understanding of 'the supremacy of the Mercian kings' is weighed.

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It is by no means universally agreed that Lindsey was ever a kingdom or had kings. Stenton, in what is still the most thorough discussion of Lindsey, expressed his doubts on the matter but then dismissed them; there are other scholars who retain theirs. Of those listed, for example, in the supposedly royal genealogy (not aregnal list) of Lindsey, none apart from the last named, Aldfrith, is known to have been a king; some of them may indeed have ruled, but Lindsey would be unique if power had always been transmitted by direct royal primogeniture. Certainly our almost total ignorance of Lindsey's history is a considerable obstacle to viewing it as a fully developed kingdom; but that absence of evidence is no doubt largely due to its early subordination to Northumbria and Mercia by turns. Bede's description of it, whatever else he neglected to tell us, asprouinciaand its meriting a bishop both point to the conclusion that Lindsey was indeed a kingdom, but one of those which succumbed early on to aggrandizing neighbours.

The Anglo-Saxon see of Worcester was probably not established until 679 or 680, over eighty years after the arrival of the Augustinian mission. It has usually been taken for granted that the Hwicce, for whom the new see was set up, had until then been subject to the see of the Mercians, but there is no evidence to show this. The latter see, moreover, had itself not been created untilc. 656. Are we, therefore, to assume that the Hwicce remained non-Christian until the later seventh century? If they did, we have signally failed in our efforts to find their burials; and our historical sources are strangely silent about the eventual conversion to Christianity of a people who held out against it for so long.