England's Immigrants, 1330-1550: Religious and Racial Minorities.

Professor Mark Ormrod (University of York) and colleagues have recently won funding for a large new project on the alien subsidies which will include two fully-funded PhDs. The second of these is described as follows:
"Religious and Racial Minorities in England, 1330-1550
This PhD project will take an interdisciplinary approach to the treatment of Jews, Moslems and black North Africans in late medieval England. While some traditions of medieval studies assume that these peoples were entirely absent from late medieval England, there is good evidence, to be captured by the project, of small numbers of such minorities being part of the social fabric of the period. The student will help to collect and database the relevant material drawn from historical sources: full training will be provided in the research and technical aspects of this work. The student will then be encouraged to develop his/her interests in, and approaches to, this material. A special feature of this interdisciplinary project is the interface between the empirical evidence of racial minorities’ presence in late medieval England and imaginary representations of the ‘other’ in literature and art. "

Further details here:

'England's Immigrants, 1330-1550',