Unnamed Salisbury MPs of November 1390 and 1391

Epistemic label

Low direct attestation; bounded source-backed inference.

Inference

The Salisbury constituency sequence probably contains two unnamed parliamentary representatives for the November 1390 and 1391 Parliaments. The inferred object is not a named person. It is the missing person-slot or person-slots implied by a constituency list whose surrounding returns are otherwise named.

Evidence and warrant

The History of Parliament constituency survey for Salisbury states that the names of those elected for the November 1390 and 1391 Parliaments are the only missing names in the covered sequence. That is negative evidence, but it is unusually bounded: it identifies a specific constituency, two specific parliamentary returns, and the exact nature of the absence.

The warrant does not require inventing names. It supports the existence of missing officeholder records or missing officeholder identities in those two returns. The article therefore treats the inferon as a prosopographical gap, not as a biography.

Counterevidence and limits

The evidence read so far is one controlled secondary survey. It does not prove whether the original returns are lost, unread, unpublished, or simply absent from the survey's control. It also does not establish whether the same person might have served in both returns.

What would change the score

The score would rise if a return, borough record, parliamentary writ, or specialist prosopographical note identified one or both names. It would fall if the survey's statement turned out to be a modern editorial omission rather than a historical source gap.