The question of sources is one of the most important in the study of the legal and social history of old Vilnius, as well as in the study of the past of a specific professional group – executioners.
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Unfortunately, the old city archives kept in the Vilnius City Hall were lost during the Muscovite occupation in the mid-17th century. These include the documentation dating back to the end of the 15th century (more than 100 volumes), the books of council acts, as well as registers of income-expenditure and other books.
As a result, it is only possible to analyse many aspects of the history of our capital city in more detail from the mid-17th century onwards. This huge gap in research [...] significantly distorts the picture of the history of Vilnius in the first half of the 16th-17th centuries and even of the history of Lithuania. We will probably never be able to ‘establish’ a closer and more varied contact with the citizens of that era.
We learn about the city executioner Andrius Vrublevskis first of all from the aforementioned registers of the city's revenue expenditures (which have been preserved since 1655) and the books of acts of the benchers' court and the council, whose systematic records have also been preserved, starting mainly in 1657.