7/13/26 Report - Jettons Metal Detected Adjacent to a 1715 Fleet Wreck Site. Nuremberg Jettons.

 

Written by the TreasureGuide for the exclusive use of the Treasure Beaches Report.

Obverse and Reverse of Four Objects Metal Detected by Bruce E. on the Treasure Coast.

Bruce E. sent me an email about these four objects he found near a 1715 Fleet Beach.  Below is his email.  

Hello All :    In response to your article containing jettons, I found some interesting ones from the 1715 fleet. More than two decades ago I was metal detecting with permission a site adjacent to a 1715 fleet wreck. Among other finds where these four  jettons. The planchets are carefully trimmed to be almost round, and they are the same size as modern quarter. They came out of a single hole close together roughly 8 inches deep. I speculate they were in some sort of clothing or container that washed over the dune from the hurricanes waves, and back into the woods. I've done nothing to clean our preserve them other than just wiping off the dirt. There are still some small specs of sand stuck to them. The best I can tell without an XRF scan is that they are some kind of cooperous alloy material.

 

In the legends:      On the portrait side reads    LVDOVICVS. MAGNVS. REX.

                           On the shield side reads     . LAZA: GOTTL: LAVFFERS: RECH: PF:

 

I assume especially on the shield side that this is French, or meaningful French abbreviations. I say this because Louis X1V was king of France at this time, and his grandson was Phillip V of Spain. Therefore it's not too surprising to find these jettons on the 1715 fleet.  

I certainly Cherish these is being a unique find, but realized in these days of frauds and scammers it is difficult to establish their provenance. Nonetheless they are authentic!  

Good hunting out there!! Bruce E. 

 

For size, here is one of the same objects with a quarter.

One of the Jettons Found by Bruce E.

Thanks for sharing your cool finds Bruce.

I did a little research and found the following.

Here is the translation of the legends.

The obverse means Louis XIV (“Louis the Great, King”

The reverse identifies Lazarus Gottlieb Lauffer, the Nuremberg engraver/maker.

The “RECH: PF” on the reverse stands for Rechenpfennig, which means counting token.

So, your objects are indeed jettons. It seems that both spellings, jetton and jeton, are commonly used.

From the depth and location in the dunes I thought they could have been used in the salvage effort, but maybe they washed up.  I guess we'll never know.

Jetons are mentioned but not shown in Kathleen Deagan's book Artifats of the Spanish Colonies of Florida and the Caribbean 1500 - 1800.  She suggests that by the time of the 1715 Fleet jetons would have been largely replaced by numerical calculating.  It is possible they were still being used though.

Jettons were used something like an abacus but the counters were moved on a checked board.

Here is a similar one from numista.com.  I think miaybe a little different.  I didn't inspect it closely yet.

Source: 

Counter Token - Louis XIV (Lazarus Gottlieb Lauffer) - Free imperial city of Nuremberg – Numista

Here is a very good site on jettons, and especially Nuremberg jettons.

Nuremberg Jetons - ukdfdNuremberg Jetons - ukdfd 

That site provides a lot of great information on Nuremberg jetons including the following.

Lazarus Gottlieb (son of Conrad): master 1663, died 1709

So that gives you a date for the  jetons that would seem to fit nicely with a 1715 wreck site.

This site also provides a description of how jettons would be used.  Here are a couple paragraphs.

Calculation using counters on a chequer board is analogous to that performed using beads on an abacus. The vertical columns are marked with values, such as £ (pounds), s (shillings) and d (pence), and the horizontal rows with transaction details. Counters representing the value of each transaction are placed in the applicable squares. To add the value of the transactions, all the counters are moved to the bottom row of their respective columns. For every twelve ‘penny’ counters that result, a single counter is added to the shillings square and twelve counters are removed from the penny square. The process is repeated for the ‘shilling’ counters, with each twenty resulting in a counter being added to the pound square and twenty removed from the shilling square. At the end of the process - which in the case of the Royal Exchequer would extend to columns representing many thousands of pounds - the calculation is complete. This might seem very laborious, but it should be borne in mind that the decimal system and Arabic numerals were not in use. Try performing paper calculations using Roman numerals to add £sd values!

In fact, it was the adoption of Arabic numerals, and their inherent decimal basis (importantly recognising zero as a value), that rendered jetons, at least in their traditional role, redundant. The change to accounting by written calculation occurred during the course of the 17^th century, and jetons produced since this time generally fall into one of three categories...

Once again, thanks for sharing your finds with us Bruce.  Very interesting finds!

---

This topic came in part as the result of the posts I recently did on tokens.  Funny how one thing leads to another.

Still there is no tropical development shown on the National Hurricane Center map.

The Surf charts also remain unchanged.  Nothing but a very flat surf for another week.

And we are still having a daily slightly negative low tide.

If you missed the post I did this weekend, you won't want to miss what one long-time reader found

Good hunting,

TreasureGuide@comcast.net