Because V and W weren't firmly established as their own letters until later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V > During the Late

Because V and W weren't firmly established as their own letters until later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V > During the Late Middle Ages, two minuscule glyphs of U developed which were both used for sounds including /u/ and modern /v/. The pointed form ⟨v⟩ was written at the beginning of a word, while a rounded form ⟨u⟩ was used in the middle or end, regardless of sound. So whereas valour and excuse appeared as in modern printing, have and upon were printed as "haue" and "vpon". The first distinction between the letters ⟨v⟩ and ⟨u⟩ is recorded in a Gothic script from 1386, where ⟨v⟩ preceded ⟨u⟩. By the mid-16th century, the ⟨v⟩ form was used to represent the consonant and ⟨u⟩ the vowel sound, giving us the modern letter ⟨v⟩. ⟨u⟩ and ⟨v⟩ were not accepted as distinct letters until many years later.[3] The rounded variant became the modern-day version of ⟨u⟩, and the letter's former pointed form became ⟨v⟩. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W > The classical Latin alphabet, from which the modern European alphabets derived, did not have the "W" character. The "W" sounds were represented by the Latin letter "V" (at the time, not yet distinct from "U").