6 Stuivers 'Rijderschelling'

Zutphen's independent coinage rights were a persistent irritant to the States General throughout the seventeenth century. The city, as one of the principal towns of Gelderland, exercised minting privileges that frequently produced coins deviating from the monetary ordinances of the Union — the .593 fineness of this piece sitting conspicuously below the standards demanded by repeated Dutch coinage edicts. Provincial and municipal mints continued flouting those standards largely because enforcement was slow and profitable noncompliance was easy.

The rijderschelling type takes its name from the mounted knight — a motif with deep roots in Gelderland coinage going back to the medieval period. Production at Zutphen ended definitively when the Dutch Republic finally curtailed surviving municipal minting rights in the early 1690s.