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Bowman explanations

Various fanciful explanations attribute it to English archers expressing defiance towards French. There is no evidence for this and explanations are very unlikely, though it is a frequently repeated story.

A commonly repeated legend claims that the two-fingered salute or V sign derives from a gesture made by longbowmen fighting in the English and Welsh army at the Battle of Agincourt (1415) during the Hundred Years' War.

According to the story, the French were in the habit of cutting off the arrow-shooting fingers of captured English and Welsh longbowmen, and the gesture was a sign of defiance on the part of the bowmen, showing the enemy that they still had their fingers, or, as a widespread pun puts it, that they could still "pluck yew". The longbow story is of unknown origin, but the "pluck yew" pun is thought to be a definitively false etymology that seems to originate from a 1996 email that circulated the story.

Such an explanation is illustrated in the graphic novel Crécy (published 2007), where the English author Warren Ellis imagined "The Longbowman Salute" being used even earlier, in 1346, by English archers toward the retreating French knights after the Battle of Crécy. In this story the lower-class longbowmen in the English Army used the sign as a symbol of their anger and defiance against the French upperclass, who had since the Norman conquest of England in 1066 subjugated the English people. However, that is a work of fiction.

The bowman etymology is unlikely, since no evidence exists of French forces (or any other continental European power) cutting off the fingers of captive bowmen; the standard procedure at the time was to summarily execute all enemy commoners captured on the battlefield (regardless of whether they were bowmen, foot soldiers or merely unarmed auxiliaries) since they had no ransom value, unlike the nobles whose lives could be worth thousands of florins apiece.