Definition
A ceremonial vessel — historically a box or chest — used in England to collect sample coins from the Royal Mint for periodic assay and testing. The pix (also spelled pyx) gives its name to the Trial of the Pyx, a formal inquisition by which a jury of goldsmiths examined whether newly minted coin conformed to the legally prescribed standard of fineness and weight. The process of submitting coins to this examination is called "pixing." The term refers both to the physical container holding the test coins and, by extension, to the entire assay proceeding.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Pix" appears in contemporary informal English as a plural of "pic," meaning pictures or photographs, and is used colloquially to refer to motion pictures or movies.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 directs the reader simply to "Pyx" — the vessel used in religious ceremony, particularly the container in which consecrated Eucharistic bread is reserved or carried in the Roman Catholic and some Anglican traditions.
The gap between common and legal meaning is significant on two levels. First, the modern informal sense (photographs, films) shares nothing with the legal term. Second, even the historically familiar religious sense — a sacred communion vessel — differs fundamentally from the legal usage, which concerns a secular instrument of monetary quality control. A researcher encountering "pix" or "pyx" in historical legal sources must determine from context whether the reference is to the mint assay process, the coin-testing container, or the ecclesiastical vessel; the words were spelled and pronounced identically but belonged to entirely different institutional worlds.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears infrequently in legal sources and almost exclusively in the context of English monetary law and mint regulation. Researchers will encounter it most often in historical treatises on the law of coinage, currency, and the prerogatives of the Crown over the money supply.
The primary trap is orthographic: historical sources use "pix" and "pyx" interchangeably, and searches limited to one spelling will miss relevant material. In digitized historical corpora, "pix" may also retrieve false positives from later editorial annotations, archival finding aids, or modern slang intrusions in scanned documents.
The Trial of the Pyx is a genuine and ancient English constitutional proceeding with a continuous institutional history; it is not a purely antiquarian curiosity. References to it appear in treatises on the royal prerogative, in parliamentary records concerning the Mint, and in works on the law of property and standards. Researchers working on the history of monetary sovereignty, currency regulation, or the prerogative powers of the Crown should treat "pix" as a gateway term pointing toward this broader institutional literature.
Burrill's entry for "pix" as transcribed in the source material appears to contain a mis-assignment — the text discussing pilots, harbors, and draught of water belongs to a different headword (likely "Pilot" or "Pilotage") and reflects a pagination or extraction error in the source. Researchers relying on Burrill should verify the surrounding text independently.
Jurisdictional relevance is essentially limited to English law and, derivatively, to Commonwealth jurisdictions that inherited English mint law. The Trial of the Pyx has no direct American legal counterpart; U.S. coinage law developed its own assay and testing mechanisms under federal statute.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (both the first and second editions) defines pix in identical substance: it is a mode of testing coin, specifically the procedure by which English coinage is examined to determine whether it meets the prescribed standard — described as "pixing" the coin. The second edition's entry is embedded within a longer passage that begins with a definition of "pirate," which reflects a sequential dictionary layout rather than any conceptual connection between the two terms.
Both Black's editions are concise to the point of incompleteness. They identify the phenomenon but provide no detail about the institutional mechanics: the Trial of the Pyx involved a formal jury empaneled from the Goldsmiths' Company, operating under a writ issued from the Crown, with procedures traceable to medieval English mint regulation. Neither edition situates the term within the broader law of the royal prerogative over coinage or explains why the proceeding remained significant long after routine assay methods modernized.
Burrill's entry, as extracted, does not address pix in its monetary sense at all — the text provided concerns pilotage. This appears to be a source extraction error. Researchers should not treat the Burrill passage as authority on pix.
No entry in the standard historical legal dictionaries addresses the ecclesiastical pyx or its relation to the legal term, which is appropriate: the two uses share an etymology and an object-form but diverged entirely in institutional context.
Jurisdictional Note
The Trial of the Pyx is a distinctly English institution with roots in the medieval English mint system. American law has no equivalent proceeding; U.S. coinage standards and assay requirements are governed by federal statute and administered through the U.S. Mint. Researchers working in American legal history will encounter "pix" or "pyx" in this legal sense only when sources are drawing on or contrasting English precedent.