THE FORBES O CULM
A Scots Historical Ballad of George Forbes of Chełmno
(1704–1757)
❧
Original text · Literary analysis · Historical note
Daniil Lazko
Даниил Лазько
Tuapse, 22 September 2026
THE FORBES O CULM
A Scots Historical Ballad of George Forbes of Chełmno (1704–1757)
I
It's Culm abune the Vistula
Stands heich upon its hill,
An its reid brick wa's gang roond aboot
Like girds on a cask o yill.
II
The tolbooth stands in the mercat-place,
Wi its tower an its lime-white wa',
An the iron rod that mets the land
Is fixit on't for a'.
III
The Polish tongue an the German tongue
Gang back an forrit there,
An Forbes, a name frae Aberdeen,
Is cried across the square.
IV
In seventeen hunner an fower
Balthazar had a bairn;
They gied him George to be his name,
An the tongues o Culm to lairn.
V
He gaed up tae the Academy
In seventeen-fifteen,
Whaur the Latin grammars, thumbed an black,
Were never keepit clean.
VI
Nine year he trod the causey-stanes
Frae schule to faither's door,
Till the schule-bell rang him oot for guid
In seventeen-twenty-four.
VII
The years gaed doon the Vistula
Like barges wi the grain,
An George was a man o the mercat syne
Wi a ledger o his ain.
VIII
He took Wiktoria Czechowicz
To be his wedded wife,
An the Polish tongue cried her Forbesowa
A' the days o their life.
IX
In seventeen-forty-seven
They set him on the bink
In the tolbooth chaumer, bailie made,
Wi quill an sand an ink.
X
Syne burgrave, an syne burgomaister,
Wi the toon's seal in his haund;
The reid wax dreepit on the deeds
O hoose an rig an land.
XI
On mercat-days the kintra carts
Cam creakin up the brae,
An the carters took their bonnets aff
Whan he gaed by that way.
XII
Five hooses in the toon were his,
Five door-stanes an five keys,
An at Martinmas the rents cam in
Like leaves aff the linden trees.
XIII
Ayont the wa's on the Culm-land lay
The lands he held on lease,
Wi the wheat in stooks upon the rigs
An the stubbles white wi geese.
XIV
Aberdeen was a word his faither said
Wi the Norland sea in't still;
But Culm was the causey under his feet
An the kirk-bell on the hill.
XV
His dochter was Bridget Victoria —
Bride's name an her mither's name;
His son was Joseph Longinus;
An the kirk-bell cried them hame.
XVI
In fifty-five the seal gaed by
Intil anither's haund,
An in fifty-sax few men in Culm
Had mair o hoose an land.
XVII
In seventeen-fifty-seven,
Whan the stubbles were toom an broon,
On the sixth day o October
George Forbes laid him doon.
XVIII
They bore him ower the causey-stanes
He'd trod frae schule to door,
Past his five hooses an the iron rod,
An ben the kirk's stane floor.
XIX
Black is the stane in the kirk o Culm,
The gowd on't catchin licht;
It names his faither, wife an bairns,
An ca's him wise an richt.
XX
Abune the gowd, his pentit face;
Ablow the gowd, the shield:
Three bears' heids that cam frae Don
Bide in Culm on a reid field.
Daniil Lazko
Tuapse, 22 September 2026
1. Form and Metre
The ballad consists of twenty quatrains (eighty lines) in Scottish Common Measure: lines of four and three stresses alternating, rhymed abcb. The metre is accentual rather than strictly syllabic, as in the traditional ballad: unstressed syllables are allowed to gather in twos and threes (“An the iron rod that mets the land”), and a few lines deliberately carry a heavier stress load where the matter requires weight — most notably the last line, “Bide in Culm on a reid field,” whose closing spondee seals the poem acoustically. These roughnesses are retained as features of living ballad speech rather than smoothed into regular iambics.
All twenty b-rhymes are full rhymes in Scots pronunciation (hill/yill, bairn/lairn, grain/ain, brae/way, licht/richt, shield/field). Only one rhyme pair on name/hame occurs in the poem, reserved for stanza XV, where the word hame acquires its fullest literal and thematic weight.
2. Architecture
The poem avoids the chronological pattern of a biography in verse (born — educated — married — elected — died). Instead it moves through five spaces, each of which transforms the one before it. Stanzas I–III establish Culm itself: the brick walls above the Vistula, the tolbooth, the market square in which Polish and German are spoken and the Scots name Forbes is heard among them. Stanzas IV–VI form the boy in the town: he is given “the tongues o Culm to lairn”, goes up to the Academy in 1715, and treads the causey-stanes between school and home until 1724.
Stanzas VII–XIII show the mature burgher and civic officer entirely through objects and actions: the ledger, the marriage, the bench of the court, the town seal and the red wax on deeds of house and land, the country carts coming up the brae, five doors and five keys, the leased fields beyond the walls. Stanzas XIV–XV turn the question of origin, and XVI–XVIII carry the life towards death: the seal passes into another hand, the stubbles lie empty, and the dead man is carried along the same street he walked as a schoolboy. Stanzas XIX–XX end in the church, before the memorial.
3. The Motif System
The poem is held together less by narrative than by recurring objects, each of which returns with altered meaning. The causey-stanes are the schoolboy’s daily road in VI, the lived homeland “under his feet” in XIV, and the road of the funeral in XVIII. The iron rod — the historical Chełmno measuring rod fixed to the town-hall wall — is introduced in II as a civic standard “fixit on’t for a’” and reappears in XVIII as one of the landmarks the dead man is carried past.
The seal appears in X in Forbes’s hand, with the red wax dripping on deeds “o hoose an rig an land”, and returns in XVI as it “gaed by / Intil anither’s haund”; the formula “hoose an land” repeats in the same position. This is incremental repetition in the manner of the Child ballads: the words stay, and the situation changes around them. The verb cried (III, VIII, XV) and the kirk-bell (XIV, XV) form a smaller acoustic chain: the town calls the Scots name across the square, the Polish tongue calls Forbes’s wife Forbesowa, and the bell calls his children home.
The palette is also structural: the red brick of the walls (I), the lime-white town hall (II), the red wax (X), the black stone and gold letters of the memorial (XIX), and finally the red field of the arms (XX).
4. Name and Place
The central tension of the poem — Scottish origin against Chełmno belonging — is never stated as a theme. It is carried by names. The Forbes name enters the poem already spoken in a foreign square (III). The boy receives a name and a set of languages (IV). The Polish language absorbs the Scots surname through its own grammar, making Wiktoria Czechowicz Forbesowa (VIII). The daughter’s name joins Bride, the Gaelic saint of Scotland and Ireland, to her mother’s name (XV).
Stanza XIV is the hinge of the whole design. Aberdeen is “a word his faither said / Wi the Norland sea in’t still”: Scotland is inherited as speech and memory. Culm is “the causey under his feet / An the kirk-bell on the hill”: the town is inhabited as ground and sound. The homeland remains in the name; the town has become the lived homeland. Forbes is not presented as an exile, and the poem contains no nostalgia for a country he may never have seen.
5. Chełmno as a Living Place
Following the observational discipline of Alexander Hume, Culm is drawn from its own physical realities rather than from generic scenery: the town set high on its escarpment above the Vistula, the ring of red-brick Gothic walls, the white Renaissance town hall on the market square, and the Chełmno measuring rod, the standard of length for the Culm Law. The Culm-land (Ziemia Chełmińska), the grain barges going down the river, the geese on the autumn stubble and the lindens of the town belong to the same observed world.
Martinmas (XII) was chosen because it belongs to both cultures at once: it is one of the traditional Scottish term days, and St Martin’s Day was also a customary day for the payment of rents and dues in the Polish lands.
6. The Tradition Behind the Voice
The narrative matrix is that of the Border and Child ballads: an abrupt opening (“It’s Culm abune the Vistula / Stands heich upon its hill”), compression, scene-to-scene movement without connecting exposition, incremental repetition, and an ending on an image rather than a moral. William Drummond’s influence is felt in the gravity of the final movement, in which an individual life is enlarged by its encounter with mortality without being inflated. Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson stand behind the civic texture: tolbooth, mercat, bailie, burgrave, ledger, carts and keys. Burns contributes only idiomatic energy — syne, ayont, toom, lairn, yill — and none of his lyrical sentiment.
The poem therefore belongs to a quieter, civic and mercantile branch of the Scots historical ballad. It has no battle, no journey and no romance; its drama is the slow transformation of a Scottish name into a part of a Polish-Prussian town, and then into a monument within it.
7. Language
The Scots is literary but not antiquarian. Grammar and idiom are Scots throughout (gaed, gied, intil, an, wi, zero relatives where the ballad tradition permits them), while the vocabulary is chosen for function rather than colour: tolbooth and bailie are the exact Scots equivalents of the Polish civic institutions; causey names the paved street; girds on a cask o yill (I) gives the town walls a merchant’s image, since a cooper’s hoops were an everyday object of the trade. Polish and Latin names (Wiktoria Czechowicz, Joseph Longinus, Forbesowa) are left unassimilated, so that three linguistic worlds remain audible within the Scots line.
8. The Ending
Stanzas XIX and XX form an ekphrasis that follows the actual structure of the memorial described by Peter Paul Bajer: a black tablet with a gilded inscription, the funeral portrait above it, the heraldic cartouche below. “Black is the stane in the kirk o Culm, / The gowd on’t catchin licht” establishes the whole monument; then the eye moves up and down from the gold: “Abune the gowd, his pentit face; / Ablow the gowd, the shield.” The gold of the inscription becomes the hinge between the two stanzas.
The final couplet unites the four terms on which the poem is built — Forbes (the bears’ heads), Scotland (Don), Chełmno (Culm) and memory (bide, to remain and to dwell). The arms are rendered as they appear at Chełmno, on a red field, as Bajer records them (Gules, three bear’s heads erased, Sable), rather than in the familiar Scottish tinctures of the Forbes arms (Azure, three bears’ heads couped Argent, muzzled Gules). The change of colour is itself a small emblem of the whole poem: the Scottish charge has been redrawn in the colours of its new place.
9. Editorial Note: Documented Fact and Reconstruction
All dates, offices, family names, the five town houses, the leased estates, and the physical description of the memorial derive from the sources listed below. A small number of details are literary reconstructions, plausible for the period but not individually documented: the rents paid at Martinmas (XII), the carters baring their heads (XI), the Polish form Forbesowa (VIII), and the route of the funeral past the town hall (XVIII). No event, office, journey or speech has been invented. The epitaph’s praise of Forbes’s prudence and his title of Royal Secretary were deliberately left out of the verse, so that the poem would not close on a list of epithets.
George Forbes of Chełmno (Culm), 1704–1757
Background
George Forbes of Chełmno is one of the best-documented Scottish merchants and civic figures of the eighteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He belonged to the Scottish community of Chełmno (German Culm), a royal town of Polish (Royal) Prussia on the Vistula, and to the second generation of a family of Scottish emigrants associated with Aberdeenshire, the historical heartland of the Forbes kindred on Donside. His father was Balthazar Forbes.
Education
Born in 1704, George Forbes was educated at the Academy of Chełmno from 1715 to 1724. The Academy (Akademia Chełmińska), a Latin school connected with the University of Kraków, gave him the humanist and legal formation expected of a future member of the burgher elite of a Prussian town governed by the Culm Law.
Civic Career
Between 1747 and 1755 Forbes held successive offices in the municipal government of Chełmno, rising from bailiff to burgrave and finally to mayor. His career thus shows the full integration of a Scottish-descended family into the civic institutions of its adopted town.
Wealth and Property
By 1756 Forbes was among the wealthiest inhabitants of Chełmno. He owned five town houses and held leases on some five further substantial landed properties. His fortune reflects the typical path of the Scottish merchant families of Royal Prussia, which moved from trade into urban property, land and office within one or two generations.
Family
Forbes married Wiktoria Czechowicz. Among their children were a daughter, Bridget Victoria, and a son, Joseph Longinus. The combination of a Scots-Gaelic saint’s name with Polish and Latin names in the next generation illustrates the family’s cultural position.
Death and Memorial
George Forbes died on 6 October 1757. He is commemorated by a memorial in a Chełmno church: a black tablet with a gilded inscription, surmounted by a funeral portrait, with the family arms in a cartouche below. The inscription gives genealogical information, including the names of his wife and children, and an epitaph which praises his wisdom, prudence and righteousness and records his appointment as Royal Secretary (secretarius regius), a title frequently conferred on distinguished burghers as a mark of royal favour.
The Forbes arms on the memorial are described by Peter Paul Bajer as Gules, three bear’s heads erased (2 and 1), Sable. They differ in tincture from the standard Scottish arms of Forbes (Azure, three bears’ heads couped Argent, muzzled Gules), and Bajer cites the Chełmno epitaph as an example of Scottish heraldry as it was displayed and adapted in the Polish-Lithuanian lands.
Significance
Forbes’s life contains no battle, no political intrigue and no dramatic journey. Its historical interest lies precisely in its ordinariness at the highest civic level: a Scottish name, carried by emigrants into Prussia, becomes within a generation part of the governing elite of a Polish town and is finally fixed in its church in stone, gold and paint.
Scots English
abune / ablow above / below
ain own
an and
ayont beyond
bailie bailiff, civic magistrate
bairn child
ben in, inside, through
bide remain, dwell
bink bench (here the bench of the town court)
bonnet cap
brae hillside, slope
broon brown
burgomaister burgomaster, mayor
cam / gaed / gied came / went / gave
causey, causey-stanes paved street, cobbles
chaumer chamber
cried called, named
dochter / faither / mither daughter / father / mother
dreepit dripped
fixit fixed
forrit forward
fower / sax four / six
frae from
gird hoop of a cask
gowd gold
haund hand
heich high
heid head
hoose, hooses house, houses
intil into
keepit kept
kintra country, countryside
kirk church
lairn learn
mair more
Martinmas St Martin’s Day (11 November), a term day
mercat market
met to measure
Norland northern
pentit painted
reid red
rig strip of ploughed land, field
schule school
stane stone
stook shock of sheaves
syne then, afterwards
tolbooth town hall
toom empty
toon town
wa’ wall
whan / whaur when / where
wi with
yill ale
Sources
Bajer, Peter Paul. Scots in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 16th–18th Centuries: The Formation and Disappearance of an Ethnic Group. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Digital copy via the collection “East Prussia in Literature” (prussia.online): https://prussia.online/Data/Book/sc/scots-in-the-polish-lithuanian-commonwealth-16th-18th-centuries/Bajer%20P.%20Scots%20in%20the%20Polish-Lithuanian%20Commonwealth,%2016th-18th%20Centuries%20(2012),%20OCR.pdf
Bajer, Peter Paul. Article on the Forbes family in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Studia Historyczne, 2015, no. 4. https://journals.pan.pl/Content/100666/PDF/Studia%20Historyczne%204-2015%201Bajer.pdf
Daniil Lazko
Даниил Лазько
Tuapse, 22 September 2026
