Nobody is quite sure what 'Chigwell' means.
The place-name scholar P. H. Reaney read it as 'Cicca's well', Cicca being an Anglo-Saxon personal name. Medieval sources spell it Cinghe uuella or Chikewelle. Folk etymology looks for a lost 'king's well' in the south-east of the parish, while the 18th-century historian Nathaniel Salmon derived the '-well' from Anglo-Saxon weald, a wood. Chigwell was mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086.