Assay Offices in the Kingdom of Boehemia in 18th. century

[Argentum2]

I would much appreciate were someone able to provide information on the assay offices operating in the Kingdom of Bohemia frm c. 1735 to 1753.

I am engaged in some research on the career of Carl Rudolph Kändler after his departure from England in c. 1735 until his death in Schirgiswalde (Ober Lausitz) in 1753.

The hypothesis I am following would see him settling in Schirgiswalde for confessional reasons after his return to Germany. CRK, the son of a Lutheran pastor, converted to Catholicism while in England and appears to have married into a circle of English aristocratic/gentry recusants families with wide continental connections. He was buried in the parish church in Schirgiswalde in 1753.

By the terms of the Treaty of Prague (1635) Upper and Lower Lauzitz (Lusatia) were ceded to the Elector of Saxony by the Emperor as King of Bohemia. However, the town of Schirgiswalde was reserved as an enclave of the the Kingdom of Bohemia, but entirely surrounded by the new territories of the Elector of Saxony.

It would appear that this arrangement was agreed so as to allow a refuge for the Emperor's Catholic subjects who poured into the town making it almost exclusively Catholic. They also brought with them many professions, trades and skills that gave great prosperity to the town. This arrangement survived until 1845.

In this scenario, when CRK settled here, he would have had to register a maker's mark and also assay his wares in an assay office of the Kingdom of Bohemia rather than in Saxony , which would have been problematic since it was a Protestant state (with the exception of the Electoral Court at Dresden).