ESSEX RIVERS AND THEIR NAMES.
295
he says, "gives the whole stream from here to the Blackwater
"the name of Frosh or Froshwell," though, he adds, "some
"thinke the whole brook to be named Pant."
The correct name of the river has been in doubt for centuries,
as may be gathered from the foregoing. Bede records'2 that
Cedd, soon after he was appointed Bishop of the East Saxons,
in 653, built two churches in his diocese—one at Tilbury, on the
Thames : the other "in the city which is called, in the tongue
"of the Saxons, Ythanceastir, . . .73 which is on the bank
"of the river Pant" (in ripa amnis Panta). The river is again
referred to as the Pant, in the "Battle of Maeldun," written about
991, in which the English and Danish armies are described74
as facing one another on the two sides of the stream, waiting
impatiently for the tide to fall, so that they might engage to-
gether :—
And, till their spears together clashed, too long the time did seem
To Viking and East Saxon ranks, arrayed by Panta's stream.
At last, the tide having fallen sufficiently, the Danes crossed,
and—
Westward, o'er Panta's gleaming waves, they bore their shields,
And stood upon the bank75 ;.......
Then the fighting began.
In the present day, the river is commonly known as the
Pant above Bradford Bridge, in Bocking, and as the Blackwater
below that bridge. Three miles below Bocking, Stane Street
crosses it by a bridge, in the hamlet of Blackwater, at which the
parishes of Pattiswick, Stisted, and Bradwell all meet. Saxton,
in 1576, showed the river at this point as "Blackwater flu."
Norden76 includes the Pant among "Other small rivers . . .
''and other streames of no great recconning" ; but he fails,
curiously, to indicate the particular river he. calls by that name.
Chapman and Andre (1777) call the river the Pant above Kelvedon,
but Blackwater below that town. Cary, in 1824, showed it as
the. "Freshwell or Blackwater River" from its source to the sea.
From all the evidence, one may infer that the more-correct
name of the river is Pant from its source to the sea. That
72 Hist. Eccles. Gentis Angl., lib., iii., ch. 22 (written about 730).
73 That is, Othona, in Bradwell, at the mouth of the estuary.
74 See translation, by Lt.-Col. Lumsden, in Macmillan's Mag., lv., pp., 371-379 (1887). The
original text is printed by Thorpe, Analecta Anglo-Saxonica, pp. 131-141 (1846).
75 The particular portion of the Pant in question was the channel between Northey Island
and the mainland, according to Mr. E. D. Laborde (see Engl. Hist. Rev., xl., pp. 161-173 : 1925 J.
76 Descrip. of Essex, p. 12 (1840).
T