Douzain ou grand blanc du Dauphiné - Francis I

The Dauphiné retained its own mint infrastructure and monetary identity long after its 1349 annexation by the French crown, and Francis I exploited this administrative quirk aggressively — issuing regional billon types that technically circulated as dauphinois currency while serving broader royal fiscal needs. The douzain denomination itself was a workhorse of everyday exchange in sixteenth-century France, filling the gap between petty copper and meaningful silver at a moment when the influx of American bullion had not yet destabilized European price structures.

The .359 fineness places this squarely in the degraded billon range that French moneyers had been quietly engineering downward for generations.