Writing in the mid-1970s, G. O. Sayles argued in a typically forthright manner that ‘to still pretend that the history of the medieval parliament is being written when the sparse and uninformative details of the obscure lives of obscure men are laboriously collected because they made a fitful appearance among the commons is merely to veil the hard realities of medieval politics in what was an essentially aristocratic society’. It was a restatement, in blunter terms, of an argument put forward five decades earlier by A. F. Pollard, who cautioned against exaggerating the parliamentary importance of the representatives in the early fourteenth century, given low re-election rates and a reluctance to serve in the commons or attend if elected. Sir Goronwy Edwards had immediately taken issue with Pollard's efforts to minimize the role and industry of the representatives, leading to a dispute between the two which was effectively won by Edwards, with most subsequent historians before Sayles accepting his case.

Thus by 1975, Sayles was fighting something of a hopeless battle. However, his frustration is understandable. During the 1950s and 1960s, it must have seemed as though parliamentary historians were doing little else but prosopographical studies of the representatives in parliament. The work of J. S. Roskell dealt with the membership of the commons and the characters who occupied the developing role of speaker, whilst he supervised a number of theses which dealt with the representation of individual counties in the period 1377–1422.