28 Stuivers / Florin Countermark A10

The Dutch Republic's chronic shortage of standardized specie in the late seventeenth century drove provincial authorities to countermark foreign and domestic coins already in circulation rather than strike fresh issues. Groningen and the Ommelanden, perennially the most financially strained of the seven provinces, used this mechanism repeatedly to revalue or authenticate coins whose status had become uncertain. The "A10" countermark on this florin served an administrative validation function, essentially the province vouching for the coin's continued legal tender status at the specified valuation.

Countermarked pieces from this issue survive in a wide range of host-coin conditions, since the underlying coin could have been decades old by 1693.