1 Groten

Bremen's groten coinage of this period occupied an awkward position in the city's monetary system — nominally silver, but struck at a fineness so low that contemporaries frequently disputed whether the pieces qualified as silver at all. The 1742 issue falls within a decades-long period of debasement in the city's small change, driven by the chronic difficulty of maintaining billon coinage at any politically acceptable fineness while still generating seigniorage revenue for the municipal treasury.