Anglian Period.
When the Angles or English settled in the country, as they did in the seventh century, they came in by two routes, which can be traced by their place-names and their grave monuments. One was by Stainmoor and the Cumberland coast, round to Ravenglass; and the other by Craven to the coast of Morecambe Bay. There is no evidence of their settlement in the Lake District fells, except in the Keswick neighbourhood, where the story of St. Herbert gives us a hint that though the fell country might not be fully occupied, it was not unexplored in the seventh century. The mention of the murder of Alf and Alfwine, sons of King Alfwald, in 789 at Wonwaldremere cannot be located at Windermere with any certainty; but still it is possible that the Angles penetrated to Coniston.
The Anglian settlements are known by their names—Pennington, the tun of the Pennings in Furness; Workington, the tun of the Weorcingas, and so on. Among the mountains there is only one ton—Coniston, or as it was anciently spelt Cuninges-tun, Koninges-ton. Conishead in Low Furness was Cunninges-heved, the headland of the King, where perhaps Ecgfrith or his successors had a customs-house to take toll of the traders crossing the sands to the iron mines. So Cynings-tun (the y pronounced like a French u, and making in later English Cunnings-tun) might mean King's-town; in Norse, Konungs-tun, whence we get the alternative pronunciations of the modern spelling, Coniston or Cuniston. What the Norse had to do with it we shall soon see.
Now it is unlikely that kings lived in so out-of-the-way a place; but possible that they appropriated the copper mines. The ancient claim of kings to all minerals is still kept in mind by the word "royalty." And if the king's miners lived here under his reeve or officer, their stockaded village would be rightly known as Cynings-tun, the King's-town.
It is right to add that some antiquaries make the names beginning with Coning-or Coni-to mean the Rabbits'-town, Rabbits'-head, Rabbits'-garth, and so forth, and yet even in Iceland, which was always republican, there is a Kongsbakki, King's-bank, at which no king ever lived. In ancient times, as now, sentiment counted for something in the naming of places; and many names, otherwise without meaning, may have been simply given by the settler in remembrance of his old home. We cannot say for certain that Coniston was not so called by an immigrant of the Viking Age, much later than the invasion of the Angles; possibly he came from a place of similar name in Craven or Holderness or elsewhere and brought the name with him.
The Welsh appear to have remained under Teutonic (or later, Scandinavian) masters, and one relic of their tongue seems to show how they were treated. They seem to have been employed as shepherds, and they counted their flocks:—
Un, dau, tri, y pedwar, y pimp;
Chwech, y saith, y wyth, y nau, y dec;
Un-ar-dec, deu-ar-dec, tri-ar-dec, pedwar-ar-dec, pemthec;
Un-ar-pymthec, deu-ar-pymthec, tri-ar-pymthec, pedwar-ar-pymthec, ucent;
or in the ancient equivalent form of these Welsh numerals, which their masters learned from them, and used ever after in a garbled form as the right way to count sheep. The Coniston count-out runs—
Yan, taen, tedderte, medderte, pimp;
Sethera, lethera, hovera, dovera, dick;
Yan-a-dick, taen-a-dick, tedder-a-dick, medder-a-dick, mimph;
Yan-a-mimph, taen-a-mimph, tedder-a-mimph, medder-a-mimph, gigget.
And from these north-country dales the Anglo-Cymric score has spread, with their roaming sons and daughters, pretty nearly all the world over. (See the Rev. T. Ellwood's papers on the subject in Cumb. and West. Antiq. Soc. Transactions, vol. iii.)
During the ninth century the Anglian power declined. Welsh Cumbria regained some measure of independence with kings or kinglets of its own, under the dominant over-lordship of the Scottish crown. But the Anglian settlers still held their tuns, though their influence and interests so diminished that it was impossible for them to continue and complete the colonization of Lakeland. It remained a no-man's-land, a debateable border country, hardly inhabited and quite uncivilised.