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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;romismatist, post: 7189664, member: 44106&quot;]Does this count? </p><p><br /></p><p>There is actually an interesting story behind this piece. Back in the &#039;80s, when I was living in Europe (and regulations around metal detecting weren&#039;t as strict in some countries as they are today), I found this one-sided lead &quot;token&quot; near a Hanseatic fort in northern Germany. The piece is stamped &quot;1712&quot; and has a cast coats of arms as well as a stamped &quot;8&quot; in the upper left corner.</p><p><br /></p><p>For 25 years, this piece sat in a drawer without being identified. Recently, I made a concerted effort to figure out what it really was. Was it siege coinage? This looks similar, but siege coinage is usually cut from silver plate, not lead. Or was it something else?</p><p><br /></p><p>I finally got closer when I found a picture of a similar piece that was found near Rotterdam. Then I stumbled across this site, which has literally catalogued thousands of these pieces: <a href="http://www.loodjes.nl/" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://www.loodjes.nl/" rel="nofollow">http://www.loodjes.nl/</a></p><p><br /></p><p>They&#039;re actually known as &quot;loodjes&quot;, and were lead tokens used as &quot;toll&quot; payment within the Netherlands to pass through certain waterways. My example shows the coat of arms of Alphen and Oudshoorn, and the 8 is for the 8 stuivers toll to be paid for crossing the &quot;Heimansbrug&quot;. These tokens were often cut into a variety of different shapes; mine is in more of a conventional lozenge form. </p><p><br /></p><p>Who would have known? Unravelling this 25-year old mystery opened up a whole new world of payment that isn&#039;t formal coinage to me.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1274873[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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