Denier - Pepin the Short

Pépin III seized the Frankish throne in 751 with papal backing, deposing the last Merovingian king Childeric III, who was tonsured and sent to a monastery. The coinage reform that followed broke decisively from Merovingian practice — Pépin standardized the denier on a heavier weight standard, centralizing production under royal authority in a way his predecessors had never managed. This was not merely administrative tidiness; it was a direct assertion that coin production belonged to the king, not the church or local magnates who had effectively controlled Merovingian minting.

Morrison's classification of this type reflects the ongoing scholarly difficulty in attributing specific dies to specific mints across Pépin's reign, as mint signatures were inconsistent before Charlemagne's later reforms locked the system down.