McFarlane was born on 18 October 1903, the only child of A. McFarlane, OBE. His father was a civil servant in the Admiralty and the young McFarlane's childhood was an unhappy one. This may have led to the deep melancholy that seemed to pervade much of his adult life. His family sent him to public school at
Dulwich College as a day-boy. McFarlane did not particularly like the atmosphere of the public school. In 1922 he earned a scholarship to read history at
Exeter College, Oxford. His tutor during these years was
C. T. Atkinson. Following the completion of his
DPhil on the loans of
Cardinal Beaufort to the English Crown (September 1927), McFarlane became a fellow of
Magdalen College, where he remained for the rest of his life. His most important contribution to the field was his revision of the understanding of late medieval
feudal relationships, known as "
bastard feudalism". The old consensus, promoted primarily by Bishop
Stubbs, was that payment for service in feudal relationships had promoted greed and civil strife. McFarlane, however, pointed out the adhesive effect of such a system, and other forms of patronage, as a field of common interest for
the Crown and the
landed aristocracy. According to Christine Carpenter in
Wars of the Roses – Politics and the constitution in England c. 1473–1509 (Cambridge University Press 1997): "It is hard to exaggerate the impact of McFarlane's work, especially at Oxford where he taught. A whole generation of students there was inspired to work on what had been a very neglected century; nearly all the political historians of fourteenth and fifteenth century England today, including the present writer, are, academically speaking, the children or grandchildren, even great grandchildren, of McFarlane." She also described him as being responsible for a "paradigm shift". In more recent debate, it has been pointed out that McFarlane created a "paradoxical metaphor – the image of a polluted, dirty, as it were contaminated phenomenon – of the feudalism" which led to follow-up terms as it was a late-medieval "bastard urbanism" (a term invented by 19th-century historians to characterize feudalism as it took form in the Late Middle Ages, foremost in England). In July 1966, while house-hunting before retirement, McFarlane was "ambushed by a stroke which killed him instantly". McFarlane never married. ==Publications==