1 Dreier

Hamelin struck this coin in 1622 at the height of the Kipper- und Wipperzeit, the currency debasement crisis that swept the Holy Roman Empire between roughly 1619 and 1623. Municipal mints across Germany — including many that had no business striking coins — flooded circulation with underweight, debased small silver, exploiting the chaos of the early Thirty Years' War to turn a profit on seigniorage. Hamelin was among them. The Kalv/Schr 160a variety distinguishes itself within the local sequence by specific die characteristics documented by Kalvelage and Schrock in their corpus of Lower Saxon municipal coinage.