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A section for all you budding etymologists where each week the origin of a word or phrase is investigated.
This week it is..... Run the gauntlet
To go through a series of criticisms or harsh treatments
at the hands of one’s detractors.
Gauntlets are familiar to us today as the stout leather
gloves used for gardening and the like. Mediaeval
gauntlets were made of even sterner stuff. Gauntlets,
or gantlettes, gauntelotes etc., formed part of suits of
armour. They were usually covered with plates of steel
and were as useful for attack as for defence. When a
dispute arose involving a member of the English nobility
who was wealthy enough to own his own armour then
he (it was always a he) would literally ‘throw down the
gauntlet’ as a challenge. That phrase is first recorded in
Hall’s Chronicles of Richard III, 1548:
“Makynge a proclamacion, that whosoeuer would saie
that kynge Richard was not lawefully kynge, he woulde
fighte with hym at the vtteraunce, and threwe downe
his gauntlet.”
Another ancient custom of British fighting men was a
form of punishment in which the culprit was made to
run stripped to the waist between two rows of men who
whipped and beat him as he passed by. These beatings
were extremely severe and the victims often died as
a result - and many of those that didn’t may well have
wished they had, as survivors were sometimes executed
afterwards. This punishment is the source of the term
‘running the gauntlet’ and was used by both the British
army and navy.
It would be natural to assume that gauntlets were used
in the beatings and that ‘running the gauntlet’ derived
from that. In fact, that’s not the case and neither the
punishment nor the phrase have anything to do with
gauntlets, either military or horticultural.
The name of the brutal punishment was originally
‘running the gantelope’. Gantlope is an Anglicized
form of the Swedish word ‘gatlop’, or ‘gatu-lop’, which
refers to the gate of soldiers that the victim had to pass
through. The Ist Earl of Shaftsbury recorded the phrase
in his Diary, 1646:
“Three were condemned to die, two to run the gantelope.”
It didn’t take long for gantlope to migrate into ganlet, or
gauntlet - possibly as a result of a simple muddle over
the similar-sounding words or possibly because of the
association with the use of gauntlets as weapons and
with the antagonism implicit in ‘throwing down the
gauntlet’.
The earliest known record of the gantlet form of the
phrase is in Joseph Glanvill’s The Vanity of Dogmatizing,
1661:
“To print, is to run the gantlet, and to expose ones self
to the tongues strapado.”
The first use of the currently used ‘gauntlet’ spelling
comes from the intriguingly named Increase Mather, in
The History of King Philip’s War, 1676:
“They stripped them naked, and caused them to run
the Gauntlet.”
Some writers, recognising that ‘gauntlet’ was used in
error, continued to use the ‘gantelope’ version into the
18th and 19th centuries - well after the word was archaic
and otherwise unused; for example, Henry Fielding in
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling , 1749:
“Some said he ought to be tied neck and heels; others
that he deserved to run the gantlope.”
Any such attempts are now long abandoned and we are
left with a ‘gauntlet’ phrase that has nothing to do with
gauntlets.
Is there an English phrase or saying that you would
like to know more about?
Email it to us on submissions@awolonline.net
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