[Juror inspecting a coin during the Trial of the Pyx, a ceremony that dates to the 12th Century in which coins are weighed in order to make certain they are up to standard]
[Coin being held]
[Trial of the Pyx in progress]
[Juror inspecting a coin]
[Gold coins]
Eleni Bide (interview): “The process that you witnessed today has been largely unchanged, especially since the 1870 Coinage Act, and what you can see there are the jurors, who are all members of the Goldsmiths company, counting the coins that come out of the packets in the Pyx boxes to make sure that they’re the right amount there, that that’s all present and correct, inspecting them, giving them a visual inspection to make sure they look okay but then most importantly, randomly selecting a coin from each packet that will go off for testing. And this is not, this is testing that has to happen in a laboratory, it can’t happen just by looking at them.”
[Juror inspecting a coin]
[Silver coin commemorating Paul McCartney]
[Jurors looking at coins]
[Coins being handled]
Eleni Bide (interview): “It’s a way of making sure that if you’re in the UK, the coins that are in your pocket are real and reliable, that you know what they’re made of, that they are up to the right standards. So they’ll do things like, if you put them in a vending machine, they’ll work in the vending machine because they’re all the same shape and size but also, perhaps most importantly, they’re very difficult to counterfeit. Because the more standardized, the more uniform you can make the coins, that provides a challenge for people who want to fake them. So making really standardized perfect coins is really important part of preventing forgery.”
[Juror holding a coin]
[Coin]
Eleni Bide (interview): “But I think what makes it particularly special is it still has a serious purpose behind it. It’s still relevant, it’s not just there for show, it’s still a proper test. And if something goes wrong, then that creates a problem that needs to be resolved. I think the important thing to remember that actually the person who is on trial here is the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the UK, as they are technically the Master of the Mint. Historically, if they’d been found to have overseen badly produced coins, they would have been financially liable to recompense the Treasury for that, for the money lost because of that. So nowadays I don’t think that would happen, but if anything did go wrong, if a fault was found, it’s unlikely, but it’s possible that if a fault was found, that would be a big prompt to go and make sure that the processes in the Mint were running okay.”
[Coins being taken out from a bag]
[Jurors checking coins]
[Gold coins]
[Boxes]
This script was provided by The Associated Press.