The gauntlet is armour for the hand: steel plates riveted to a leather glove, with a flared cuff, a plate over the back of the hand and articulated lames along the fingers.
A gauntlet is a glove of steel plates: a flared cuff covering the wrist, a shaped plate over the back of the hand, and articulated lames running along the fingers, all riveted to a leather glove.
It is the most demanding piece in a harness. Every other plate can simply be made thicker; a gauntlet has to protect a hand that must still close on a sword, a lance or a poleaxe, and every gram of protection is bought against dexterity.
It also protects the part most likely to be hit. The hands are held forward of everything else, and the fifteenth-century fight books are explicit that they are the target of choice — an opponent who cannot grip has lost, whatever the rest of his armour is doing.
The foundation is a leather glove. Every plate is riveted to it, and the glove is what holds the assembly together and lets it flex — a gauntlet with the leather rotted away falls into a pile of unrelated pieces, which is exactly how most of them survive.
The cuff is a single flared plate covering the wrist and the lower forearm, overlapping the vambrace above it. Fourteenth-century cuffs have the distinctive "hourglass" profile, wide at the opening and pinched at the wrist; fifteenth-century ones flare more simply.
Over the back of the hand sits a shaped metacarpal plate, and from its lower edge run the finger defences: small overlapping lames, each riveted through the glove, with a separately articulated thumb. The palm carries no metal at all.
Its job is to keep a man in the fight. A cut to an unprotected hand ends the engagement immediately, and a fully armoured man with bare hands is not armoured in any sense that matters.
The fight books treat the hands as a primary target and teach striking at them directly. Fiore dei Liberi and the German masters after Johannes Liechtenauer both work from the same understanding: a man in full harness has very few openings, and the hands are the closest and the most reachable.
It also enables technique. Half-swording — gripping the blade to drive the point into a gap — is only sane in gauntlets, and the whole armoured fighting system depicted in the fifteenth-century manuals assumes them.
Its strength is that it solves a problem with no alternative. Nothing else protects the hand, and mail mittens, the earlier solution, transmit every blow straight through to the fingers.
Its limitation is the palm. Armouring it would give complete protection and make the gauntlet useless, so the palm stays leather and the inside of the hand remains the one deliberately unarmoured part of a full harness.
The trade-off between fingered and mitten forms is the other constant tension. A mitten gauntlet, with the fingers under a few broad lames, is stronger and simpler; a fingered one lets the wearer do more. Both were in use at once, and the choice was the wearer's.
The earliest solution is mail: integral mittens on the sleeves of a twelfth-century hauberk, with a leather palm and a slit at the wrist so the hand could be freed. They protect against cuts and do nothing about impact.
From the later thirteenth century plates are added over leather or whalebone gloves, and by about 1350 the hourglass gauntlet is established — the first true plate gauntlet, with a flared pinched cuff and lames over the fingers.
The fifteenth century refines rather than replaces it. Cuffs become simpler and larger, articulation improves, and the mitten form spreads for heavy fighting while fingered gauntlets continue alongside. Later developments — the locking gauntlet that fastens the hand shut around a sword hilt — belong to the tournament and to the sixteenth century.
Milanese gauntlets are rounded, smooth and generously proportioned, matching the Italian approach to the rest of the harness, and Italian workshops exported them across Europe.
German gothic gauntlets are narrower, more sharply pointed and often fluted in line with the rest of the harness, and they tend toward the fingered form where Italian practice more often used mittens.
A useful asymmetry: the left and right gauntlets of a harness are frequently not the same. The bridle hand needs less dexterity and often gets a heavier mitten, while the weapon hand keeps fingers.