Bow and Arrow

As a youthful hunter I took up the bow. And came close to setting the worlds record for missing close up shots of deer. After a few unsuccessful years, I gave it up and stuck with my hunting dogs, upland game , geese and duck hunting.  What goes around comes around they say. And so it has come to pass that as a historian and former bow hunter I return  to the bow and arrow.

At Agincourt, English Archers wiped out the cream of French knighthood with their longbow arrows. At the Pope and Young museum in Chatfield, Minnesota, I saw the history of American archery displayed very vividly. And in Email hoaxes I’ve  noted that a picture of a huge  dead mountain lion had been claimed to prove that the animal had been killed by a bow hunter in at least fifteen states. The message being on the unreliability of such so called  email “proofs.”   It is with some trepidation that I now share with you an email message on the subject of the battle of Agincourt and it impact on us over 600 years later!

"I never knew this before, and now that I know it, I feel compelled to send it on to my more intelligent friends in the hope that they, too, will feel edified. Before the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the French, anticipating victory over the English, proposed to cut off the middle finger of all captured English soldiers. Without the middle finger it would be impossible to draw the renowned English longbow and therefore they would be incapable of fighting in the future. This famous English longbow was made of the native English Yew tree, and the act of drawing the longbow was known as 'plucking the yew' (or 'pluck yew'). Much to the bewilderment of the French, the English won a major upset and began mocking the French by waving their middle fingers at the defeated French, saying, See, we can still pluck yew! Since 'pluck yew' is rather difficult to say, the difficult consonant cluster at the beginning has gradually changed to a labiodentals fricative F', and thus the words often used in conjunction with the one-finger-salute! It is also because of the pheasant feathers on the arrows used with the longbow that the symbolic gesture is known as 'giving the bird’.

Of course, another version of this story is that Winston Churchill, a world renowned historian, knew well that it took two fingers to draw the English longbow. Thus he used a more accurate symbol. The one that came to stand for victory….