Improbable because (i) the French did not particularly employ the longbow – if the story had been about Welsh peasants it would have been another matter and (ii) because it is too beautiful – Beachcombing has learnt, in the last year, that the more satisfying a story the less likely it is to be true. It is a charming, delightful and improbable story. The two finger salute became then a pre-battle greeting to the fingerless French. Allegedly the English, knowing the value of the longbow, would not kill any French peasants that they captured, but chop off their two bow fingers making it impossible for them to use the weapon. The English in their fourteenth and fifteenth century campaigns fought and annihilated the French – Crecy, Poitiers, Agincourt… – with use of the longbow. There is a charming origin story that has become better and better known in the last generation. Then what about the origins of, in many ways, the most curious of them all: the British and Irish (and Australian and New Zealand), twin fingers, the v sign insult lifted insultingly towards the enemy (pictured above) – not to be confused with the reverse Churchillian v for victory sign. The devil’s horns lifted against sfiga in Mrs B’s Italy… The ‘manly’ and utterly vulgar single middle finger.
Think of Elizabethan nonces biting thumbs at each other in Romeo and Juliet. Moonman recently wrote in about the history of hand gestures.
But one that a reader may better be able to complete than he. In this emergency situation he thought that today he would offer a cookie dough post: a hopelessly inadequate, incomplete, short foetal abortion of an essay. Indeed, as he walks up and down the stairs he feels as if his head is banging on the walls on either side. The sun is in the heaven, term is over and with the good luck that characterises him Beachcombing has come down with a cracking summer cold.
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