Where did swearing using fingers come from?

Question

Where does swearing using the middle finger and using two fingers originate from?

Answer 1

Continuing on from poster 1 I understand that when a bowman was captured, he had a finger cut off. So they put 2 fingers up to show they still had both and could therefore still use a bow.

As to the one finger - no idea.  

Answer 2

english bowmen used two fingers to pull there bow string when fighting the french, it became a gesture of insult to the enemy

Answer 3

the  french cut of the english bowmans two fingers so they could not use there bow and arrows. they then use d to put up there two fingers  

Answer 4

An early recorded use of the 'two-fingered salute' is in the Macclesfield Psalter of c.1330 (in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge), being made by a glove in the psalter’s marginalia

The belief that the V sign originated among archers might have its origin in the work of the historian Jean Froissart (c. 1337-c. 1404). In his "Chronicles", he recounts a story of the English waving their fingers at the French during a siege of a castle, however he makes no reference to which fingers were used

According to a popular legend the two-fingers salute and/or V sign derives from the gestures of longbowmen fighting in the English army at the Battle of Agincourt (1415) during the Hundred Years' War. The story claims that the French claimed that they would cut off the arrow-shooting fingers of all the English longbowmen after they had won the battle at Agincourt. But the English came out victorious and showed off their two fingers, still intact. Historian Juliet Barker quotes Jean Le Fevre (who fought on the English side at Agincourt) as saying that Henry V included a reference to the French cutting off longbowmen's fingers in his pre-battle speech. If this is correct it confirms that the story was around at the time of Agincourt, although it doesn't necessarily mean that the French practised it, just that Henry found it useful for propaganda, and it does not show that the 'two-fingers salute' is derived from the hypothetical behaviour of English archers at that battle.

It was not until the start of the 20th century that clear evidence of the use of insulting V sign in England became available, when in 1901 a worker outside Parkgate ironworks in Rotherham used the gesture, (captured on the film), to indicated he did not like being filmed. Peter Opie interviewed children in the 1950s and observed in The Lore And Language Of Schoolchildren that the much older thumbing of the nose (****-a-snook) had been replaced by the V-sign as the most common insulting gesture used in the playground.

Desmond Morris discussed various possible origins of the V sign in Gestures: Their Origins and Distribution, (published 1979) and came to no definite conclusion: