1 Pfennig 'Buchstabenpfennig'

Hildesheim's "Buchstabenpfennig" — letter pfennig — takes its name from the single letter struck on the reverse, a practice the city adopted to distinguish its small silver issues during a period when dozens of competing municipal and episcopal mints in Lower Saxony were producing nearly identical bracteate-derived pfennigs. The Bishop of Hildesheim and the city had been locked in a prolonged struggle over civic autonomy throughout the fourteenth century, and the city's independent coinage was itself a assertion of that hard-won municipal standing. Mehl 280 sits at the lighter end of the pfennig weight range for the period.