4 Pfennig

Hamelin's municipal coinage of this period operated under a privilege that most Lower Saxon towns had quietly abandoned by mid-century. The city continued striking its own silver fractions well into the 1670s partly because the Thirty Years' War had so thoroughly disrupted regional monetary networks that local issues remained practically necessary decades after Westphalia. Small denominations in particular filled gaps that the larger territorial coinages of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel and Calenberg-Grubenhagen never reliably covered at the retail level.

At 1 gram in silver, these circulated hard and wore fast.