1 Sechsling

Hamburg's Sechsling denominations of this period occupied an awkward monetary position — too small to be genuinely useful, too silver-bearing to be struck cheaply in copper. The billon alloy here reflects the city-state's reluctance to abandon precious metal content in its petty coinage even as neighboring German states had largely switched to base metal for equivalent fractions decades earlier.

The J#47a designation distinguishes this from related die variants in the Jaeger catalog. Hamburg retained independent monetary authority until German unification forced standardization under the 1871–73 coinage reforms, after which issues like this were demonetized.