1/2 Groschen - William of La Voulte

William of La Voulte served as bishop of Valence and Die from 1366 until his death in 1383, presiding over a diocese caught between competing pressures from the Dauphiné and the papacy at Avignon, then barely forty miles south. The bishops of Valence held the right to mint by imperial grant, a privilege they exercised intermittently and often at small scale — which accounts for the relative difficulty of assembling a complete type sequence for this see.

Dying 1299 in Poey d'Avant's classification places this squarely in the late feudal minting tradition of the Rhône corridor, where episcopal issues frequently shadowed royal Gros Tournois types in both weight and module.