Mite - Joan of Merwede

Joan of Merwede inherited joint lordship of Gerdingen and Stein in the mid-fifteenth century — an unusual circumstance in the Low Countries, where female seigneurial authority over minting rights was rarely exercised directly. Her copper mites occupy a narrow window of feudal coinage in the Brabantine orbit before these small lordships lost practical monetary independence to the consolidating Burgundian administration.