Decimation

Decimation, a Roman military punishment, whereby when a considerable body of troops committed some grave military offence, which would be punished with death in an individual, the punishment was awarded to one-tenth of them by lot, instead of to the whole number, that so the army might not be too much weakened. The practice was borrowed from the Romans by Essex at Dublin (1599), by the Austrians at Leipzig (1642), and by the French at Trèves (1675); but Blücher tried vainly to employ it against the mutinous Saxon battalions at Liège (1815).