Gros blanc 'à la queue' - John II

John II struck this issue during one of the most financially ruinous periods of the Capetian succession — the Hundred Years' War was bleeding the treasury, and the French crown had resorted to systematic debasement to meet military costs. The "à la queue" designation distinguishes it from earlier gros blanc types by the tail-like extension on a specific element of the design, a detail that mattered to contemporaries primarily as a way to track successive debasement cycles.

John was captured at Poitiers the following year, 1356, and the ransom demand of three million gold écus made the monetary instability of this period considerably worse.