Sterling - Reinoud I

Reinoud I ruled Guelders during a period when English sterling pennies had become so dominant in Low Countries commerce that local lords began striking deliberate imitations to capture seigniorage from the trade. This piece is one of those imitative sterlings — not a forgery in the modern sense, but a conscious policy decision to participate in the currency system that English merchants had effectively imposed on the region's markets.

The type references in van der Chijs and Mayhew's sterling corpus place it firmly within the broader Low Countries imitative series that flooded northern European fairs from roughly the 1270s onward.