On a moorland hillside south of Halifax in Yorkshire the name Murgatroyd was used by a tribal group in the 14th century. There had always been people living on this land, Roman coins have been found and the steep sided valley below the hill was reputed to be the home of Ludd, a Nordic chieftain. When the Anglosaxons conquered the land who knows what skirmishes were organised from here to harry the invaders. The group living here then, in the 15th century when records start, would probably include ancestry from all the previous occupiers of the nearby lands and would have been farmers and weavers.  In the 17th century Puritanism became the popular religion of the area although a lot of Murgatroyds can be also found in Church of England parish records.