Beda Angehrn served as Prince-Abbot of Saint Gall from 1767 until the abbey's forced dissolution by the Helvetic Republic in 1805, though coinage in his name effectively ceased well before that end came. The Abbey of Saint Gall had held imperial immediacy — answerable to the Emperor alone — since the medieval period, and its right to strike coin was an expression of that status rather than any practical monetary need. These billon pfennigs circulated in the immediate territories of the abbey, a jurisdiction that was already shrinking under pressure from the surrounding Swiss cantons.
Beda Angehrn served as Prince-Abbot of Saint Gall from 1767 until the abbey's forced dissolution by the Helvetic Republic in 1805, though coinage in his name effectively ceased well before that end came. The Abbey of Saint Gall had held imperial immediacy — answerable to the Emperor alone — since the medieval period, and its right to strike coin was an expression of that status rather than any practical monetary need. These billon pfennigs circulated in the immediate territories of the abbey, a jurisdiction that was already shrinking under pressure from the surrounding Swiss cantons.