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THE ESSEX NATURALIST.
otherwise Chel-mere(s)-ford. From this ford, the town of Chelms-
ford got its name : not from the fact of its being situate on a
river called the Chelmer ; for there is no evidence that there ever
was a river so called, the name being merely a back-formation
from Chelmeresford.
(12).—The Can (length about 12 miles) rises at High Roding,
close beside the Roman road, and flows south-eastward through-
out, passing through the Easters, the Chignals, and Writtle, to
Chelmsford, where it joins the Chelmer.
The name Can is probably a modern back-formation, and
does not appear on any early maps, though it has now got on to
the Ordnance Maps. It appears on Jeffery's Map of about 1720,
but is thereon applied, apparently, to the river now called the
Wid, which is a tributary of the Can. That the name has been
in use locally for at least fifty years, I can testify personally,
having been born within a hundred yards of the river's bank and
lived all my life in its valley. The name suggests that its inventor
believed that the stream rose in one or other of the Canfields ;
but its source is at least a mile from the nearest point on the
boundary of either of those parishes. It is not easy, therefore, to
see whence the stream got its name. There is, I believe, no
other English river so called.
In view of the fact that the greater part of the river's course
lies in the Easters and the Chignals, it might have been dubbed
more appropriately either the Eas or the Chig !
(13). —The Wid (length about 14 miles), a tributary of the Can,
is a somewhat-remarkable river, in that it receives an unusually-
large number of small tributaries and that, in its course, it
completes more than three-quarters of a circle, which, with
the small streamlet often known as the Roxwell Brook, encloses
the very-large parish of Writtle and several adjacent parishes,
some, if not all, of which have been formed since the Con-
quest out of the once-enormous Royal Manor of Writtle,
which contained formerly a Royal Forest.
The Wid rises in the village of Blackmore and flows at first
southward, through or past Doddinghurst and Mountnessing ;
then, turning more eastward, it passes Hutton and continues
almost to Billericay ; then, having received small nameless
tributaries from Ingrave and Burstead, it turns sharply due
north and continues through or past Ingatestone, Buttsbury,