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By Adrian Ash

So the money changers never did get thrown out of the temple during Easter Week 2008. They got open ended support instead from the money lender of last resort, and snapped up a near broken bank for $2 a share.

Lost beneath the traffic jams, chocolate eggs and mini daffodils of Easter here in the United Kingdom, meantime, sits a very odd and ancient custom which might also say something about the value of filthy lucre, even today.

Each Thursday before the Good Friday Bank Holiday and to remember the Last Supper, when Christ washed his disciples' feet (according to John) and issued his new, eleventh commandment to love one another as I have loved you the English monarch gives specially minted coins to a special number of pensioners at a special church service dating back eight hundred years or more.

This Maundy Money is pretty much the only kind of money that the monarch ever handles. First coined in 1662 for Charles II, it was handed out this week by Queen Elizabeth to 82 men and 82 women in Armagh, Northern Ireland one for every year of her life.

Surrounded by a 20 mile ring of steel of police checkpoints (it was the first ever Maundy Thursday service in Northern Ireland), she gave two small leather string purses to each of the 164 church and community elders chosen to gather before her in St.Patrick's cathedral.

The red purse contained a token sum of regular cash, given to represent alms of food and clothing. The white purse, in contrast, contained 82 pence in small silver coins.

Classed as legal tender and worth just $1.62 at today's exchange rate, this year's Maundy money is vastly under priced compared to its 92.5% sterling silver fineness. You'll find payments from previous years trading at a significant mark up to the legal value on eBay as well.

Maybe HRM doesn't know, care or mind about the Maundy money's real cash value which would seem to be the whole point of alms giving, after all. But the last known sighting of her handling regular cash like an ordinary mortal was way back in 1968, when she bought Prince Edward then six years old some boiled sweets (bullseyes, as it happens) at a shop near Balmoral, her Scottish retreat.

Which begs the question just what does she keep in that stout little handbag today?

Elizabeth II has no need of an Amex or gold Morgan Stanley card, of course. Flunkeys remain on hand, more than 940 years after the first English king was crowned at Westminster, to settle whatever bills she might run up. But this tradition of separating the monarch from money at least in the public's imagination bears only one exception each year. God's anointed must otherwise stay away from the currency of everyday life.