Definition
A historical military punishment in which the offender was compelled to run between two parallel rows of soldiers, each of whom struck the runner as he passed. The punishment was administered as a form of corporal discipline within military ranks and was known colloquially as "running the gauntlet." The term GANTELOPE is the archaic legal and military spelling; the word was pronounced, and is now almost universally rendered, as "gauntlet" or "gauntlett."
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The gauntlet (military punishment).
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 records "gantlet" as the correct form of the military punishment, distinguishing it from "gauntlet" (a glove or armored glove), and defines it as the punishment of running between rows of men who strike the offender.
The gap here is orthographic and phonetic rather than conceptual: legal and historical dictionaries preserve the spelling GANTELOPE while ordinary language settled on "gauntlet" or "gantlet." A researcher encountering GANTELOPE in a court-martial record, military code, or legal dictionary should recognize it immediately as the running-the-gauntlet punishment, not a reference to a glove or the modern idiomatic phrase "running the gauntlet" (meaning to face a series of challenges).
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Common Confusion
GANTELOPE / GAUNTLET: In common modern English, "throwing down the gauntlet" and "running the gauntlet" are distinct idioms derived from two separate French and German source words — the glove (gantelet) and the lane of punishment (gatlopp). Historical legal sources use GANTELOPE specifically for the punitive military practice. Researchers should not conflate this term with references to the armored glove or its associated challenges-and-dueling symbolism when those terms appear in legal or military records.
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Why It Matters in Research
GANTELOPE is a term of almost exclusively historical significance. It appears in early military law materials, court-martial records, and colonial-era legal dictionaries, but has been obsolete as an active legal term for well over a century. Researchers will encounter it primarily in:
1. Historical military codes and articles of war, including British and early American military regulations predating the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
2. Colonial and early federal court-martial records, where GANTELOPE or "running the gauntlet" appears as a specified punishment.
3. Legal dictionary shelf sources from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where it is preserved as a defined military law term.
The primary research trap is the spelling. Corpus searches for "gauntlet" will not surface records spelled GANTELOPE, and vice versa. Any full-text search of historical military law materials should include variant spellings: GANTELOPE, GANTLET, GAUNTLET, GAUNTLETT, and GANTLOPE. Bouvier and Rapalje both cite the London Encyclopaedia as authority, suggesting neither is drawing on independent legal doctrine — this term entered American legal dictionaries as a borrowed military definition rather than through developed case law or statutory construction.
There is no modern legal counterpart. Corporal punishment of this kind was abolished in American military practice well before codification of the UCMJ. GANTELOPE has no living doctrinal significance and requires no jurisdictional analysis.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence and Bouvier's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement — their entries are nearly word-for-word identical, and both cite the same single source (the London Encyclopaedia). This convergence signals that the term entered American legal lexicography as a received definition rather than one shaped by domestic legal practice or judicial interpretation.
Both sources note explicitly that the word itself was "pronounced gauntlett," which suggests the compilers recognized that GANTELOPE was already an unfamiliar spelling requiring clarification for their contemporary readers. The fact that two major American legal dictionaries felt it necessary to gloss the pronunciation confirms the term was archaic even at the time of their publication.
Neither dictionary elaborates on the legal procedure, conditions, or limits of the punishment — no detail as to how many soldiers constituted the ranks, what instruments were used, or under what authority the punishment was ordered. For that level of operational detail, researchers must go beyond legal dictionaries to primary military regulations and historical military law treatises.
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