202 BANSTEAD COMMONS. 
It turned out, however, that the interest of the 
Lord of the Manor in the soil of the Commons, 
subject to common rights, but with the possibility 
of inclosure, whatever it might be, had been mortgaged 
for the sum of £31,000 to two ladies, who were clients 
of the Messrs. Parker, and who had been, it is to be 
feared, fraudulently advised by them to embark their 
money upon what was, at best, a most shadowy and 
dangerous security, dependent wholly for its value on 
the success of the suit. 
These mortgagees now took possession of the 
Commons under their mortgage deed. They at once en- 
deavoured to realise an income for their unfortunate in- 
vestment by excessive cutting of turf and digging of 
gravel, for sale, and refused to listen to any remon- 
strances of the Committee of Commoners. They stripped 
large areas of the Commons of their natural turf, and 
carted away the soil upon which the value of the land 
for pasturage depended. The Commoners, therefore, 
felt it necessary to revive the suit. They made the 
mortgagees parties to the action, and claimed an order 
to prevent the reckless destruction of the surface 
of the Commons to the detriment of their own 
rights. The point at issue was no longer directly the 
right of the lord to inclose; the immediate question was 
the right to destroy the Commons by stripping them of 
turf and robbing them of loam. Indirectly this would 
have involved ultimately the fate of the Commons. 
The new issue altered the onus of proof in the 
suit, and made the question far more difficult to the 
