And the Normans were sufficiently impressed by his performance to name the place Morte de Bois, which name upon the tongues of the common Saxon people was eased down to Mortiboys." There, with the last three of his men dead about him, he set fire to the hut and died within the flames. At sunset he was surrounded in the only spot which remained to him - a woodsman's hut in the centre of the woods. "The owner of the place at that time, called upon to be William's liege or to surrender the place, 'refused with many oaths,' and when the day of reckoning came, opposed, with his little force of house-carls, the mounted knights. The history of the place goes back to before the Norman invasion - in "Jassy" Barney Hatton tells us the story of how it was named:
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