Denier - immobilization in the name of Ralph

Nogent-le-Roi, a small lordship in the Eure-et-Loir, struck these deniers under the shadow of Carolingian monetary convention long after that authority had practically dissolved. The "immobilization" practice — freezing a coin type in the name of an earlier lord, here Ralph (Raoul), who died in 936 — was a deliberate political fiction, allowing local lords to mint under inherited legitimacy rather than assert coinage rights they technically did not hold. Raoul himself had been King of France; invoking his name on a local feudal issue is a telling measure of how fragmented monetary authority had become in the decade following his death.