1 Pfennig 'Buchstabenpfennig'

Hildesheim's civic coinage of this period operated in the perpetual tension between the city's merchant interests and the territorial ambitions of the Prince-Bishops, who contested the right to strike coin throughout the fourteenth century. The "Buchstabenpfennig" designation — letter pfennig — derives from the alphabetic or initial-letter devices used to distinguish issues within the series, a practice that allowed the city to manage successive die productions without dating individual strikes.

The thirty-year span assigned to this type reflects numismatic inference rather than documentary precision; no single civic ordinance survives pinning the series to exact years.