THE SHAW O BELY

THE SHAW O BELY
A Historical Ballad in Scots
Twenty-two quatrains in common measure
with a Literary Commentary, a Glossary of Scots Words, and a Historical Note
Daniil Lazko
Tuapse, 20 September 2026
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THE SHAW O BELY

I
Grim was the name afore the Shaw,
an auld name, hard an short;
he raised the companie at hame
an merched it doun tae port.

II
Twa hunder men, or near eneuch,
set doun in Grim's ain beuk;
ae band was Scots, the tither Erse,
an baith the saut road teuk.

III
They kent nae war but ither folk's
an nane o it their ain;
they sair'd the Polish croun for meat
an coontit oot the slain.

IV
Grim's name bade stickin tae the roll
lang efter he was gane;
they read it oot at muster-time
an let the lave alane.

V
Nae haundin owre was written doun,
nae sword gied frae the hand;
Captain-Rittmeister Jacob Shaw
stuid heid o the same band.

VI
Shaw coontit pouther by the pund,
the match, the ball, the men;
he walked the wa's at skreich o day
an walked them roond again.

VII
Bely's a toun o timmer wa's
biggit on dyke an grund;
nae stane at a' in the haill o't,
juist aik an yird weel-boond.

VIII
In hairst the Russian airmy cam
an sat doun on the lea;
Cherkasskii's tents gaed raw on raw
as faur as ye cuid see.

IX
They howkit lines afore the wa'
an set the cannon in;
the first shot took the breastwark doun
an brak baith aik an pin.

X
The rain cam on, the reek hung laich,
the pouther drew the wat;
they dried it on a girdle-stane
an lost the half o that.

XI
At nicht the Russian fires cam oot
like clachans in the mirk;
the sentries coontit them an lost
the coont, an that was wark.

XII
Twice in the week they cam the ditch
wi ledders an wi cry;
twice they gaed back throu their ain reek,
the ledders lay tae dry.

XIII
The Erse anes held the northmaist tour,
the Scots the yett an brig;
twa tongues, twa drums, ae wa' atween,
an Shaw abune the rig.

XIV
The month gaed roond. The hurt lay thrang,
the meal was near its en';
they watched the wast road ilka day.
Nae word cam doun. Nae men.

XV
Shaw gaed alang the wa' at nicht
an coontit owre his men,
the hale an hurt, the pouther-horns,
an coontit them again.

XVI
A drum gaed oot, a white claith syne,
an twa gaed doun the brae;
they were an oor amang the tents
an cam back the same wey.

XVII
The yett was opened frae within,
the hinges grat wi rust;
they merched oot wi their pike an drum
intae the hairst-time dust.

XVIII
Cherkasskii gaed alang the ranks
an turned the muskets oot;
he wrote tae Moscow whit they were:
weel-ordert, an nae dout.

XIX
Nae sic word cam frae ony freend
in a' the Polish days;
it cam owre ditch an brokken bank
frae faes, an it was praise.

XX
A clerk sat doun an wrote them oot
in letters no their ain;
Shaw gied his name, the pen gaed slaw,
an Grim's auld name was nane.

XXI
The Bely Germans, sae they wrote,
for Scots an Erse alike;
the colours changed abune their heids,
they keepit drum an pike.

XXII
The road ran east, an syne ran south
whaur girse gaes oot tae stour;
the snaw lay on the cairt-ruts there
as on the Lammermuir.

Daniil Lazko
Tuapse, 20 September 2026
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Glossary of Scots Words
The ballad uses moderate literary Scots. Apostrophes mark only those elisions that a Scots reader would expect to see marked (wa’ for wall, a’ for all, en’ for end, o’t for of it); forms such as doun, oot, owre and frae are written in full, since they are Scots words in their own right and not contractions of English ones. Stanza numbers below give the first or the principal occurrence.
Scots English Stanza
ae one, a single II, XIII
afore before, in front of I, IX
aik oak VII, IX
ain own II, III, XX
alane alone, aside IV
alang along XV, XVIII
amang among XVI
anes ones XIII
abune above, over XIII, XXI
atween between XIII
bade remained, stayed IV
baith both II, IX
band company, body of men II, V
beuk book II
biggit built VII
boond bound, fastened VII
brae slope, hillside XVI
brak broke IX
breastwark breastwork, parapet IX
brig bridge XIII
brokken broken XIX
buik book, register XX
cairt-ruts cart ruts XXII
cam came VIII, X, XI, XIV, XVI, XIX
clachans hamlets, clusters of cottages XI
claith cloth XVI
coont, coontit count, counted III, VI, XI, XV
croun crown III
cuid could VIII
dout doubt XVIII
eneuch enough II
en' end XIV
Erse Irish II, XIII, XXI
faes foes XIX
faur far VIII
frae from V, XVII, XIX
gaed went I, VIII, XI, XII, XV, XVI, XVIII, XX
gane gone IV
gied gave V, XX
girdle-stane griddle stone X
girse grass XXII
grat creaked, grated XVII
grund ground VII
haill whole VII
hairst harvest, autumn VIII, XVII
hale sound, unwounded XV
hame home I
haundin owre handing over V
heid, heids head, heads V, XXI
howkit dug, excavated IX
hunder hundred II
ilka every, each XIV
intae into XVII
ither other III
juist just, only VII
keepit kept XXI
kent knew III
laich low X
lave the rest, remainder IV
lea open ground, meadow VIII
ledders ladders XII
merched marched I, XVII
mirk darkness XI
muster-time the hour of muster IV
nane none, not there III, XX
northmaist northernmost XIII
oor hour XVI
owre over, across V, XV, XIX
pouther gunpowder VI, X, XV
pund pound (weight) VI
raw row, rank VIII
reek smoke X, XII
rig ridge, crest XIII
roond round VI, XIV
sae so, thus XXI
sair'd served III
saut salt II
sic such XIX
skreich o day daybreak VI
slaw slow XX
stane stone VII
stour dust XXII
stuid stood V, XIII
syne then, afterwards XVI, XXII
tae to I, XII
teuk took II
thrang crowded, packed close XIV
throu through XII
timmer timber VII
tither the other II
toun town, fortified place VII
tour tower XIII
twa two II, XIII, XVI
wa', wa's wall, walls VI, VII, IX, XIII, XV
wark work XI
wast west XIV
wat wet X
weel-boond well bound together VII
weel-ordert well ordered, disciplined XVIII
wey way XVI
whaur where XXII
whit what XVIII
wi with XII, XVII
yett gate XIII, XVII
yird earth VII
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Literary Commentary
1. Title
The title follows the oldest pattern in the Scottish ballad canon: a personal name bound to a place, as in Edom o Gordon or The Bonnie Earl o Moray. It names a man and his ground and explains nothing further. The definite article does the rest of the work: this is not Jacob Shaw of Bely but the Shaw o Bely, the man as the regiment would have spoken of him. Alternatives considered and rejected were The Bel’skie Nemtsy, which forecloses the poem’s subject by giving it the Russian nickname before the reader has met the men, and The Timmer Toun, which promotes the fortress above the two officers the poem is actually about.
2. Form and metre
Twenty-two quatrains, eighty-eight lines, in common measure: alternating lines of eight and six syllables on a 4/3/4/3 stress pattern, rhymed ABCB throughout. Every line was counted by script against an explicit Scots exception dictionary, in which the values that a naive English syllable-counter would get wrong are set by hand — coontit as two, merched and sair’d as one, fires as one, companie as three, Cherkasskii as three. All twenty-two stanzas return 8/6/8/6 with no variance.
The traditional ballad tolerates anacrusis, and most modern ballad imitations depend on it heavily. This one admits none: there is no nine-syllable opening line anywhere in the poem. The decision was deliberate. A narrative this compressed needs a metrical floor that does not move, so that the only irregularity the reader feels is syntactic — the sentence that stops in the middle of a line, the stanza that opens with a full stop after four words.
3. The Scots
The register is moderate literary Scots, not stage dialect and not reconstructed seventeenth-century Scots. Markers are spread so that no line is more than half-marked and the syntax stays transparent throughout; a reader without Scots can follow the narrative and will meet an unfamiliar word roughly once every two lines, almost always in a position where the object named makes the sense plain. Where a word could be either Scots or English — gate, wall, book — the Scots form is used consistently (yett, wa’, beuk or buik), so that the few English-looking words in the poem, chiefly the military terms, stand out as what they are: the international vocabulary of the mercenary trade.
One item was removed in revision on exactly these grounds. An earlier version of stanza XVIII ended that kent their tredd, nae dout. The form tredd is genuine Scots — the Scottish National Dictionary lists tred and tredd among Scots forms of trade, and the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue records tredders for traders in burgh records of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The idiom, however, is not: Scots says a wabster to trade, not to ken one’s trade. The line was therefore an English idiom in Scots spelling, and it read as the least naturalised thing in the poem. Its replacement, weel-ordert, an nae dout, is also the phrase the Russian sources themselves use of the garrison.
4. Literary matrix
Four traditions stand behind the text and none of them is imitated. From the Child and Border ballads come the narrative leaps, the refusal to explain motive, the flat declarative stanza-openings and the fatalism carried entirely by fact. From Scott comes the sense of a defined military place — a fortress that can be walked round, with a north tower, a gate and a ditch. From Hogg comes the plainness of the narrating voice, which never rises above the level of a man reporting what a company did. From Burns comes only the naturalness of the Scots diction and the singability of the line; the poem is not a lyric and no stanza turns into song.
What is deliberately absent is nineteenth-century antiquarian ornament: no quoth he, no whilom, no invented archaism, no tartan colouring. The poem is a twenty-first-century historical ballad using an old form knowingly, not a forgery of an old one.
5. Architecture
The twenty-two stanzas fall into six movements. Scotland and Grim (I–IV): the company raised, the two nations in it, the salt road east, foreign pay, and Grim’s name surviving him on the muster roll. The succession (V–VI): Shaw at the head of the same band, and his first characteristic action. Bely and the siege (VII–XIII): the fortress described as an object, the Russian army arriving in harvest, the first shot, the wet powder, the night fires, the two repulsed assaults, the divided wall. Exhaustion and decision (XIV–XVI): the month, the empty west road, the second counting, the parley. Surrender and judgment (XVII–XIX): the gate, the march out, Cherkasskii’s inspection and report, and the paradox stated flat. The new service (XX–XXII): the clerk’s book, the nickname, the changed colours, the road east and south.
The hinge of the design is stanza XV, and it is a hinge made of arithmetic rather than of speech. Shaw walks the wall and counts his men; then he counts them again. The decision to surrender is never stated, never debated, never justified. It is the second count.
6. Method: the objects carry the argument
There is no abstract noun of consequence anywhere in the poem. The words honour, destiny, betrayal, loyalty, fate and history do not appear, and neither does any equivalent. The entire moral argument is carried by four objects — the muster roll, the powder, the gate hinge and the clerk’s pen — and the decisive turn of the narrative is a change of handwriting rather than a speech or a battle.
The material inventory is consistent and narrow: oak, earth, timber, rust, rain, smoke, dust, snow. Where a simile threatens to enter, it is either cut or grounded. In an earlier draft the first cannon shot struck the oak and stuck there like a pin. The image was replaced not because it was obscure but because its scale was wrong for siege artillery; in the final version the shot takes the breastwork down and breaks both oak and pin, so that the pin is no longer a comparison but a structural peg in a timber wall.
7. Grim
Grim is not a second protagonist and is not given a biography. He appears four times, and each appearance is a fact about a document or a name rather than about a man. In stanza I he is the name that precedes Shaw’s. In stanza II the company is set down in his book. In stanza IV his name stays attached to the roll after he himself has gone, and is read aloud at muster — the mechanism by which a commander survives in a company is procedural, not sentimental. In stanza XX his name is absent from the new register.
He is deliberately not given a fate. The sources do not record one, and the line lang efter he was gane is left to cover death, supersession, capture or simple departure without choosing between them. The fifteen-stanza gap between his fourth and his final appearance is also deliberate: any mention of Grim inside the siege would have prompted the reader to wonder whether he was alive, and turned an absence in the record into a plot.
8. Shaw
Shaw is never described. He is not called brave, or steady, or able; no adjective of character attaches to him anywhere in the poem. He exists in six actions: he stands at the head of the same band; he counts powder, match, ball and men; he walks the walls at daybreak and walks them round again; he is above the ridge while two nations hold two ends of one wall; he counts his men twice at night; and he gives his name to a clerk.
That last action is his only speech act in the poem, and it is also the moment at which he stops being an agent. After the gate opens he is looked at, written about and written down. The arc is built so that the reader registers this reversal without being told about it.
9. The paradox at the centre
The climax is not a battle. It is an inspection and a letter. Cherkasskii walks along the ranks, turns out the muskets, and reports to Moscow what he has seen; stanza XIX then states, in the flattest available language, that no such assessment had ever come from the garrison’s own side in all its Polish years, and that this one came across the ditch from the men who had been shooting at them.
The poem does not explain the paradox and does not draw a conclusion from it. It simply allows the professional recognition to arrive from the wrong direction. This is the emotional centre of the ballad and the reason the surrender cannot be read either as treachery or as deliverance.
10. Recurring lines
Four sequences run beneath the narrative without ever being pointed out.
roll ; muster ; buik. Grim’s name is stuck to the roll and read aloud at muster; at the end a clerk writes the company into a different book, in letters not their own, and Grim’s name is not in it. The same object, the written list, opens and closes the poem.
men ; nae men ; his men. Shaw counts his men in stanza VI. Stanza XIV ends with the west road empty: nae word cam doun, nae men. Stanza XV opens with him counting the men he actually has. The surrender is decided in the gap between the last two.
counting. Stanzas VI and XV close on the same rhyme pair, men and again, the only repeated rhyme pair in the poem. It marks the two ends of the siege and is the poem’s single deliberate formal echo.
colours. The Polish crown is served for meat in stanza III; the colours change above their heads in stanza XXI, and the drum and the pike do not. Political allegiance is shown to be the most portable thing a soldier owns, and his trade the least.
11. The ending
The last stanza refuses elegy. There is no farewell to Scotland, no reflection on exile, no summary of what the men had become. A road runs east and then south to where the grass gives out into dust, and snow lies on the cart ruts there as it lies on the Lammermuir. The two countries are made briefly commensurable by a single physical fact, and nothing is said about it.
The Lammermuir is the only Scottish place named in the poem, and it is named in the last line. The risk was taken knowingly: the alternative was to end in an anonymous cold, and that would have cost the ballad the one image that makes the distance measurable.
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Historical Note
This note separates what the sources record from what the poem reconstructs. The two are not mixed, and where the sources disagree the disagreement is preserved rather than resolved.
William Grim
Grim was a Scot and the original commander of the regiment. He is named in this capacity in the Russian and Western literature on Scots in Muscovite service, and his name remained attached to the unit in Russian administrative practice: the official list of landholders drawn from the unit in Russian service is identified as belonging to the regiment of William Grim and Jacob Shaw, which indicates that both names were carried in the records together.
Beyond this, almost nothing is documented. His dates, origin within Scotland, religion, family and fate are not established, and the sources do not say when or how command passed from him to Shaw. The poem accordingly gives him no death, no farewell and no handover scene.
Jacob Shaw
Shaw was also a Scot, and held the rank recorded as Captain-Rittmeister. He commanded the unit after Grim, and the unit is known in the literature under his name. In September 1615, after the men had entered Russian service, the boyar Prince Dmitry Pozharsky issued a charter to the Scottish and Irish companies under Shaw’s command; the original is preserved in the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts. The regiment continued to be designated by his name in Russian records — literally, the companies of Jacob Shaw.
As with Grim, no personal detail of any kind is documented: no speech, no order, no correspondence, no confessional allegiance, no family. Everything the poem shows Shaw doing is inference from the ordinary duties of a garrison commander, and nothing he does in it is attested.
The regiment
The unit was raised in Scotland, with a further company raised in Ireland, and served the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the Polish-Muscovite War of 1605–18. Its strength was of the order of 150 to 200 men, organised as two companies — one Scottish, one Irish — which served alongside one another for about three years while maintaining separate identities and strong internal cohesion.
A Russian army under Voevoda Dmitrii M. Cherkasskii laid siege to the fortress of Bely. The garrison mounted a determined defence for close to a month, then surrendered the fortress and entered Russian service. Cherkasskii was impressed by the garrison’s skill and determination and reported as much to Moscow; the men were described as excellent, well-ordered soldiers with highly competent officers. The Russians called them the Bel’skie nemtsy — literally the Bely Germans, nemets being the general Russian term for a Western foreigner — although the men were Scots and Irish.
Their subsequent service is documented in outline. In 1618 at least eighteen former members of the Bely garrison were among the troops defending Moscow against a Polish army that itself contained many Scots and Irish; several were killed or wounded, and a number of them, including George Learmonth, were prominent in the fighting at the Arbat Gates. From 1616 part of the unit was posted to Tula on the southern frontier, where they served against Tatar raids, and the regiment took part in several of the Russo-Crimean wars. Some of the men married locally and raised families in Russia. Officers of the former Bely garrison later petitioned Tsar Michael for admission to the ranks of the Russian gentry militia with land and serfs, stating that they had married and had children in Russia and did not wish to return to their own country. Some twenty-one men were eventually discharged as unfit through age or infirmity and settled near Tula on half pay, while about a dozen Scots and Irish successfully petitioned to be allowed to go home. From 1626 foreign soldiers in Russian service were entered under Russian names and, on conversion to Orthodoxy, received grants of land, money or clothing. The unit was disbanded after 1629; some of the men went to Sweden, others continued under Alexander Leslie of Auchintoul and, later, Patrick Gordon of Auchleuchries. Descendants of men from this circle enter the Russian nobility — the Lermontov family descends from George Learmonth, who served as an ensign in Shaw’s regiment and was killed in action in August 1633 during the Smolensk War.
None of this later history is narrated in the poem. It is present only as the direction of a road.
The siege of Bely in the poem
The following elements are reconstruction, consistent with the record but not attested by it: the timber construction of the walls, standard for a Russian frontier fortress of the period but not specified in these sources; the rain and the spoiled powder; the night fires and the sentries losing count; the two repulsed assaults and the ladders abandoned in the ditch; the damage to the breastwork; the shortage of meal and the wounded lying close; the parley across the ditch; the rusted hinge of the gate; Shaw’s counting of powder and his walking of the walls at daybreak; and the allocation of the Irish company to the north tower and the Scots to the gate — the separate identities are documented, this particular disposition is not. The empty road from the west is likewise inference: no relief force is recorded, and the poem assumes the garrison watched for one.
Cherkasskii is given no dialogue and is not caricatured. His inspection of the ranks is invented; his favourable report is not.
Points of deliberate historical indeterminacy
1. The year. The sources differ. The article on the regiment dates the siege to August 1613; the article on Scots in Russia, and the Belsky Chronicle material cited in both, date the surrender of Belaia to 1614. The poem names no year, no regnal marker and no calendar date. The word hairst places the siege only in late summer or early autumn, which both datings allow.
2. Grim’s fate. Stanza IV says only lang efter he was gane. Death, supersession, capture and departure are all left open, because the sources choose between none of them.
3. The succession. No transfer of command is documented, so stanza V states the absence of one rather than inventing a scene.
4. The motive for surrender. Exhaustion, the empty west road and the second counting stand side by side. The poem does not say which was decisive, and does not say whether the decision was Shaw’s alone.
5. The moral valuation. The change of side is nowhere called treason, conversion or deliverance. Stanza XXI states only that the colours changed and the drum and pike did not.
6. The names. The poem records that the names went into a Russian register in letters not their own and that the pen went slowly. It does not assert any particular spelling. An earlier draft gave Shaw the Russian form of his forename; it was removed precisely because it asserted a documentary form the sources do not establish.
7. The duration. The month gaed roond preserves the sources’ “almost a month” without hardening it into a count of days.
8. The later service. Stanza XXII gives a road running east and then south, with no named garrison, campaign or enemy — the documented southern-frontier duty without the documentary detail.
Sources
The narrative frame of this poem is drawn from the English Wikipedia articles “Jacob Shaw’s Regiment” and “Scottish Russians”, consulted on 20 September 2026, and from the literature they cite. The principal items behind the statements made above are:
—;Belsky Chronicle, Russian National Library, Uvarov collection, d. 569; and the Belsky Chronicle account of the surrender of Belaia.
—;G. M. Phipps, Britons in Seventeenth-Century Russia: a Study in the Origins of Organization (1971).
—;A. F. Steuart, Scottish Influences in Russian History (Glasgow, 1913).
—;E. D. Stashevskii, Smolenskaia voina 1632–1634. Organizatsiia i sostoianie moskovskoi armii (Kiev, 1919).
—;Paul Dukes, The First Scottish Soldiers in Russia (Edinburgh, 1992).
—;D. Fedosov, The Caledonian Connection (Aberdeen, 1996).
—;Steve Murdoch, Network North: Scottish Kin, Commercial and Covert Associations in Northern Europe, 1603–1746 (Leiden, 2006).
—;A. Grosjean and S. Murdoch, The Scotland, Scandinavia and Northern European Database (SSNE), University of St Andrews.
—;Charter of Prince Dmitry Pozharsky to the Scottish and Irish companies under Jacob Shaw, September 1615: RGADA, f. 150, op. 1, 1615, no. 3, ll. 18–18 ob.
—;Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DOST and SND), consulted for the forms discussed in section 3 of the commentary.