Yeah. Well, more generally from the Middle English spelling of “the” that used the version of the thorn character “þ” that was later confused with “y,” not necessarily with the “abbreviated” single-character version of “þe” (strictly speaking, it’s not an abbreviation at all, since it contains both the characters needed to spell “þe/the”). Also there were the (actually abbreviated) versions of “that” ( 
) and “thou” ( 
) in usage.
