In his concise handbook of Numismatics Philip Grierson has devoted a chapter to the making of coin. In it he gave a masterly survey of coinage methods from classical antiquity to the present day. In this essay I would like to exemplify some aspects of the making of coin in the later Middle Ages by a case study of the organisation of the mints of the fifteenth-century Netherlands. I have taken my information from the period after the unification of the coinages of the Low Countries by Philip the Good in October 1433.

The fifteenth century was not a period of rapid change and development in mint administration. The major medieval innovations in mint organisation had already taken place: in the thirteenth century Italians had developed individual mints to a ‘factory’ scale, and in the fourteenth century the French had evolved a system for the general administration of groups of mints. This study is therefore concerned with the portrayal of a mature and fully evolved system of mint organisation. Only minor modifications in structure were made during the two-thirds of a century under discussion. The stability in the forms of mint management lasted much longer than this period, for the organisation described here for these mints in the fifteenth century bears a marked resemblance to that described by other authors for the late fourteenth century for the mint of Flanders, and for the late sixteenth century for the mint of Antwerp.