April, and there is no evidence of his performing anything more than the standard day-to-day duties. He became a cabinet minister in 1757, still serving as Lord Chief Justice, and stayed until 1765. Reform Mansfield first sat in court on 11 November 1756, and at the time had "a very low estimate of the Common Law of England which he was to administer". The legal system had been put together in the period immediately after the Norman conquest of England, and was completely unsuited to the 18th century, when Britain was "the greatest manufacturing and commercial country in the world". Mansfield immediately began to reform the way the law and courts worked. One of his first acts as Lord Chief Justice was to change the system for submitting motions. Every day the court was in session, all barristers were invited to submit motions, in order of their seniority as barristers. Because they were allowed to submit as many motions as they wanted, by the time junior barristers were allowed to submit their motions, it was normally the end of the day. This meant that almost all the work went to the senior barristers, who were so overworked that they often did not have time to prepare properly before going to court. In addition it meant that work for junior barristers was scarce, hindering their careers. Mansfield changed the system so that barristers were allowed to submit only one motion a day, and if not all barristers had been heard by the end of the day, they could continue where they left off the next morning. At the time it was also traditional for all judgments to be reserved. Although in a small number of cases this was useful, in the majority of cases it simply made coming to court more expensive and wasted time. As soon as Mansfield became Lord Chief Justice, he changed the rules so that, unless the court had doubts over the evidence presented to them, a judgment was to be made immediately. This had a far-reaching effect on the English courts. Judges from the Court of Appeal and High Court of Justice now give reserved judgments in only a minority of cases. His reforms led to the Court of King's Bench becoming one of the most active courts, at the expense of the Court of Common Pleas, which was described as the "sleepy hollow". Mercantile law