Why you might not want corridors in your historical novel

I read C.J. Sansom’s novel Dissolution on the train recently with pleasure. For an historical novel narrated in the 1530s, what was the author to do about language? He eschewed godwottery (which Fowler, in a dated term, called Wardour Street, after the old furniture once sold there). But I did gulp at page 273: ‘I got up, waving my arms and stamping my feet to restore the circulation.’ The what?

The word circulatioun is first recorded from 1535 in the sense ‘movement in a circle’. It wasn’t till 1630 that James Primrose published a commentary, De Motu Cordis et Circulatione Sanguinis, on the theories of William Harvey. Elsewhere in his novel, Mr Sansom makes the narrator refer to the Galenic humours, so presumably he would have attributed pins-and-needles to some blockage of humours. Does this matter?

Try another case. Dissolution has more than one reference to corridors in the monastery. Now corridor, in the sense of ‘a passage off which rooms open’, was, surprisingly, not used until Byron’s time. For ‘a covered walkway between buildings’, it had been used since the early 17th century, borrowed from the Italian. It’s partly a question of architecture, since houses had one room opening into another, with no passageway past them. Mr Sansom uses passage elsewhere in the book, and the choice of using it all the time would depend on whether most readers would mind or even notice.

One word he uses that was thoroughly familiar at the time is stew (‘fish pond’), from the French estuier, ‘to shut up’. Another, in ‘the great stew of London’, meaning a stench, is of obscure but unconnected origin. Or perhaps here stew might mean ‘a brothel’, coming from a vulgar Latin word tufus ‘vapour’, which also gives us meat stew.