That's an interesting question. According to Wiki, some strange shit was happening with the letters "J" "U" "W" and apparently a letter called "thorn" which looked like a letter "y". Apparently the letter thorn is the reason some old english writing looks like "Ye Old Fart". Good question for Jeopardy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_alphabet

The last one to be removed was the long-s. It was the same sound as an s, but written in the middle or at the start of a word, while the s we have now was only written at the end of a word. The long s looked like an f with a lower tail, but no cross, and is frequently confused with an f when read by modern readers. It was common until the end of the18th century, and continued to be used (with decreasing frequency) until the late 19th century. As to why it was dropped, I can only speculate, but I dare say it was principally due to the fact it was superfluous. As industrial machine printing came into play, it was probably a little easier for type-setters and saved money on the number of types you one needed to stock and even on the amount of ink one has to use -- the short-s requires less ink than the long-s, and s is after all a very common letter, especially when one considers plurals and verbs in the 3rd person singular. Finally, the fate of the long-s was no doubt sealed when it wasn't included on the first QWERTY keyboard in 1875. Also up until the early 1800s, it was common to see u in place of v and v in place of u - e.g., "uirtve" and "uolvme". Also w until that time was literally a double u - "uu". Technically we still have an "ae" written together and an "oe" written together for certain words of Latin and Greek extraction (e.g., "foetus", "oesterus", "aeon" & "encyclopaedia"), and they are still used in formal academic writing - especially in the UK - but modern keyboards don't accommodate them.