Denier Bracteate - William II of Hardenberg

Werden and Helmstedt operated as a paired Benedictine institution with shared abbatial leadership for stretches of the medieval period, and their joint coinage issues are among the more administratively peculiar of the Lower Saxon ecclesiastical mints. William II of Hardenberg served as abbot across both houses, and bracteates struck under his authority fall into a narrow window of production when thin-flan silver coinage was already in regional decline — most of the Rhine and Westphalian territories had moved toward thicker pfennig forms by the early fourteenth century.