This is a story about the British tradition of the Trial of the Pyx, and how this centuries-old tradition has had a significant influence upon American numismatics. However, I shall begin it upon what might seem at first to be quite a tangent, and mention that the weekend before this was written, the long-awaited sale of the copper, nickel and silver portions of the famous Louis Eliasberg, Sr. Collection was jointly concluded by the numismatic firms of Bowers & Merena of New Hampshire and Stack's of New York to epic results. More on that elsewhere in this magazine, by those who actually attended the sale.

One of the many highlights of the sale was the unique 1873-CC No Arrows (NA) Dime, which was purchased by Illinois collector Waldo Bolen for $550,000. Mr. Bolen, a frequent visitor to our store, had spent a lifetime building a fabulous collection of U.S. dimes, but had never been able to acquire the 1873-CC NA. How does this relate to the Trial of the Pyx, you ask? I'll get back to that part later.

Hearing about the 1873-CC NA Dime naturally made me think of noted numismatist, fellow Chicagoan and old friend Harry X Boosel, another frequent visitor who was long known in the hobby as "Mr. 1873" for his exhaustive research into the coins of this date. Recently I had the sad privilege of helping Harry's heirs settle his estate, and though his fabulous collection of foreign and U.S. coins dated 1873 (which never did include the 1873-CC NA Dime) had long since been sold, there were many odds and ends that Harry had been too proud of or sentimentally attached to to sell in his lifetime.

Among these were Harry's official U.S. Assay Commission Medal for the year 1964 and related documents, and a long string of OTACS (Old Time Assay Commissioners Society) medals he received at the Society's meetings held during the American Numismatic Association's annual conventions since its founding in 1964. At last, you say, I have struck a thread that relates to the title of this piece. However, I assure you that the opening two paragraphs do also, in a way that will become clear later.

The tradition of the Trial of the Pyx dates from at least A.D. 1279, when every moneyer in England was required to place one silver penny selected at random from every 240 pennies made in a locked box, for testing under the king's authority every three months. The word pyx itself, sometimes spelled pix, refers to the box rather than the coins or to the testing, from the Greek word puxis and the Latin word pyxis, both meaning box.

The 240 pennies theoretically weighed exactly one troy pound of .925 fine (or sterling) silver, hence the term "Pound Sterling." The Latin word for pound is Libra, abbreviated as a script capital L with two cross lines. (Ed: if you have the character, please insert and remove "a script...lines" The penny (also known as the denarius, after the Roman denomination long used in Britain and abbreviated to this day as d.) had been introduced circa A.D. 765 in imitation of the French denier, and when its weight was standardized at 24 grains that became known as a pennyweight, abbreviated as dwt.

For a long time only a few mints coined money and this standard was generally adhered to, but under the pressure of the Danish invasion and occupation of eastern England c. A.D. 856-875 and the Norman conquest of all of England in A.D. 1066 the number of mints significantly increased, and some of the moneyers began to debase the coinage.

At first this did not affect the monarchy directly, as the majority of taxes levied upon the population were paid in food and labor and raw materials, but after the Norman Empire of William I the Conqueror (1066-1087) was divided among his sons, King Henry I of England (1100-1135) made war on his brother, Robert of Normandy, and required that a substantial portion of the taxes be paid in silver coins for use by the troops in France. There the troops discovered that many of the supposedly silver pennies had been debased with up to two-thirds tin, and were unacceptable to the merchants in France.

Henry responded by having all of the moneyers in England gathered at Winchester at Christmas, 1125, where they were deprived of their right hands and possibly other bodily parts. In this he may have felt he was showing mercy appropriate to the season, as King Aethelred II (978-1016) had increased the penalty for debasement from behanding to execution around A.D. 997, but I doubt if any of them saw it this way.

A regular system for assaying the silver contents of pennies was then established under the office of the Bishop of Salisbury for the remainder of Henry's reign, but the coinage deteriorated again in the civil war of succession which followed his death. Henry's grandson, Henry II (1154-1189), reorganized the coinage itself in A.D. 1180, and apparently began holding occasional assays of the coinage, though details of the procedures for gathering and testing the coins are unknown.

In A.D. 1247 his grandson, Henry III (1216-1272), revised the coinage again, and in 1248 called upon the mayor and citizens of London to elect 12 lawful men (as on a jury) and to appoint 12 good goldsmiths to test the old and new coinage to see if they were good, and to see at what rate the old coinage should be exchanged for the new. At this time special silver plates, or assaia, were made to represent exactly one pound of pure silver and exactly one pound of sterling silver. Stamped with special mint dies to verify their authenticity, these plates could be circulated among the various mints to be used as a weight standard that new coins could be compared to.

In A.D. 1270 Henry III appointed a Mint Warden with the authority to test, via fire assay, the King's money anywhere in the kingdom. In 1279 it was decreed by Edward I (1272-1307) that each mint should have a locked box, though perhaps not until later officially known as the pyx chest, that could only be opened with two keys, one of which the Master of the Mint would keep and the other the Warden. Four times a year the Master would deliver the pyx to the king's assayer at the office of the Exchequer in London for testing.

Over the centuries, the frequency of and the specifications for the testing and the titles of the officials who were specified to perform it have been modified many times, even as Great Britain saw the the silver content of its coinage reduced and then eliminated in this century, but to this day the tradition of having some sort of an official test for English money has become inviolable. For a detailed history of the Trial of the Pyx, of which the above is just a brief outline, the reader is referred to a series of articles by H.G. Stride in "Seaby's Coin and Medal Bulletin" for August thru October of 1959, available thru the ANA Library.

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In a young America too proud to use Pounds and Shillings and Pence for its own money but nevertheless steeped in English law and tradition, the concept of the Trial of the Pyx naturally found its way into the Act of April 2, 1792 which established the U.S. Mint. The second officer named in the Act, after the Director, was the Assayer, and Section 18 of the Act provided for an annual assay as follows:

"And the better to secure a due conformity of the said gold and silver coins to their respective standards, Be it further enacted, That from every separate mass of standard gold or silver, which shall be made into coins at the said Mint, there shall be taken, set apart by the Treasurer and reserved in his custody a certain number of pieces, not less than three, and that once in every year the pieces so set apart and reserved, shall be assayed under the inspection of the Chief Justice of the United States, the Secretary and Comptroller of the Treasury, the Secretary for the Department of State, and the Attorney General of the United States...in the presence of the Director, assayer and chief coiner of the said Mint..."

Section 19 began to get serious, providing: "And be it further enacted, That if any of the gold or silver coins which shall be struck or coined at the said Mint shall be debased or made worse as to the proportion of fine gold or fine silver therein contained, or shall be of less weight or value than the same ought to be...(long section on the embezzling of metals)...every such officer or person who shall commit any or either of the said offences, shall be deemed guilty of felony, and shall suffer death."

Fortunately this last clause was not taken literally, as the very first silver coins struck by the U.S. Mint were deliberately made to an illegal fineness. The Act provided that such coins be made in a silver alloy that was 1485/1664th pure, or approximately .8924 fine. As this was an extremely difficult fraction to work with (try figuring the percentage without using a calculator), the Assayer, Albion Cox, suggested reducing the weight of the copper alloy in each silver coin slightly to bring the overall percentage of silver in them up to .900 fine, while retaining the same net weight of pure silver in each coin as authorized by law.

In the case of the silver dollar, the suggested weight and fineness was exactly what was used for standard silver dollars from 1837 (including some coins dated 1836) up to 1965 (including all coins dated 1964), but until such time as Congress would authorize a reduction in the gross weights of the coins the Director, David Rittenhouse, with the approval of the Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and the Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, authorized the coinage of silver coins in their full authorized weights at the higher than authorized fineness.

However, Congress refused to authorize the reduction in the gross weights of the coins, perceiving it as a debasement even though the net weights of the silver in the coins were not to be diminished, and it then refused to authorize an increase in the net silver contents to bring them up to 90% of the authorized gross weights. All this time each silver coin was leaving the Mint with about 0.85% too much silver in it, technically within the tolerance allowed by law but costly to the large depositor who received back less in face value than he was entitled to.

One large depositor, a friend of President Washington, lost over $2,000 due to this practice, and successfully sued the government to recover his loss. The Mint began striking coins in the authorized fineness towards the end of 1795, and since they had not been embezzling silver but rather had been giving it away the Director and Assayer fortunately escaped the death penalty, though Rittenhouse elected to resign his position for other reasons.

In the ensuing years the Mint adhered to a scrupulous precision in the weights and fineness of its coins, as is so often evidenced by adjustment marks marring early pieces where a file or rasp was drawn accross an overweight planchet to bring it down to its standard weight. In these years the Assay Commission met regularly, testing a random selection of those coins set aside for it and generally releasing the untested but otherwise normal coins into circulation.

So religiously were coins set aside for testing and forwarded to Philadelphia for the Assay Commission that even after the Confederate States of America seized the U.S. Mint at Charlotte, NC on April 20, 1861 and continued making coins under its own authority until it ran out of dies, when the Mint was closed for good in October of 1861 some former Mint official dutifully sent 12 gold Half Eagles that the Confederacy could have used thru the "enemy" lines to the Philadelphia Mint for the 1862 Assay Commission to test. The coins were tested and found to be correct.

The U.S. Mint began issuing medals to the participants in the Assay Commission in 1860, at first as a means of promoting the new Medal Department at the Mint and later (after an interruption in the series begun during the Civil War) partly because the participants were sometimes numismatists as well eager to add the medal to their collections. Many of the Assay medals from the latter third of the 19th Century are great works of art, with classical designs honoring figures such as Archimedes, Liberty and Columbia, and occasionally recently deceased individuals such as a Director of the Mint or the head of the Smithsonian Institution.

The 1874 Assay medal, distributed at the meeting at which the coinage of 1873 was tested, shows Archimedes on the obverse and a funerary urn on the reverse honoring Prof. J. Torrey, a chemist who was supposed to have been on the 1873 Commission but for an illness which later proved fatal. A minor furor erupted after the Commission's meeting when Commissioner Thomas Acton, of the New York Assay Office, requested several additional specimens of the medal for distribution to his friends.

Among the coins tested at this meeting of the Commission were samples of the coins struck at the Carson City Mint before word of the Coinage Act of 1873 reached there, including the standard silver dollar and the half dollar which had already been released into circulation locally, and the quarter dollar and dime which had not been released but were instead destroyed. Because the Act included a very slight increase in the weights of the dime, quarter and half to make their official weights round numbers or fractions when expressed in grams, the unreleased coins of the older weights were ordered melted and all new coins of the new weights were marked with arrows at the date, mimicking the arrows of the 1853 weight reduction in these denominations.

Individually, the older coins were within the weight tolerance for a single coin, but in bag quantities the bag would have been too light. All of the 1873-CC NA quarters and dimes were therefore destroyed, except for those coins which had been set aside for the Assay Commission.

I do not know if Acton was a coin collector, but he certainly showed at least one of the traits of one. If it was not him, then I suspect that some other collector on the 1874 Assay Commission rescued the untested 1873-CC NA quarters, of which three are known today, and the unique 1873-CC NA dime from being released into circulation or, more likely, being melted. It is unfortunate that no 1873-S Seated Liberty dollar was saved, if indeed any were ever made.

The U.S. Assay Commission was abolished in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter as an unnecessary government function, now that precious metals are no longer used in coins made for circulation. Recent reports that quantities of Susan B. Anthony dollars struck from 1979 to 1981 are being embargoed from release by the Mint because of an insufficient thickness in the cladding layer which makes them unacceptable by vending machines are no doubt coincidental.

In conclusion, I think it is fairly safe to say that we have the Trial of the Pyx and, indirectly, King Edward I to thank for saving the unique 1873-CC No Arrows Dime from oblivion, and for making the round about opening of this article possible. For additional information on U.S. Assay Medals issued before 1892, the reader is referred to "Medals of the U.S. Mint, The First Century 1792-1892" by Robert W. Julian, published by the Token And Medal Society and also available from the ANA Library.

Originally published in COINage magazine in August, 1996. Reprinted with permission. Copyright 1998 by Thomas K. DeLorey.

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