1 Thaler

Hamelin's civic coinage of the mid-sixteenth century was struck during the city's period of membership in the Lower Saxon Circle, when smaller German municipalities briefly exercised meaningful minting rights before imperial consolidation steadily eroded them. The 1557 date places this piece just decades after the city's formal adoption of Lutheranism in 1540, a shift that severed Hamelin's ecclesiastical financial ties and pushed the city toward asserting its own monetary identity.

The Davenport reference 9232A distinguishes this from closely related Hamelin thaler varieties of the same period — a separation the catalogers based on die differences rather than type.