Kenneth Bruce McFarlane, FBA (18 October 1903 – 16 July 1966) was one of the 20th century's most influential historians of late medieval England.
Following the completion of his DPhil on the loans of Cardinal Beaufort to the English Crown (September 1927),[2] McFarlane became a fellow of Magdalen College, where he remained for the rest of his life.
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.
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).