10½ Heller

Bocholt's 10½ Heller is a fractional denomination that exists almost entirely because of the chronic small-change shortages that plagued the Holy Roman Empire's smaller municipalities in the early seventeenth century. Cities like Bocholt frequently issued their own emergency copper coinage — Notgeld in the loose early sense — when imperial silver circulation dried up during the disruptions preceding the Thirty Years' War, which broke out just two years after this piece was struck.

The half-heller fraction embedded in the denomination points to a local accounting system no longer in common use elsewhere, a detail that makes this a genuinely peculiar survivor of municipal monetary improvisation.