THE JESUIT O DELGATY
A Scots Historical Ballad
on John Hay of Delgaty (1546–1608)
Daniil Lazko
with a literary analysis and a historical note
Tuapse, 22 September 2026
THE JESUIT O DELGATY
I
Delgaty's wa's are thick an grey
Abune the Turra road;
A callant o the Hays gaed doun
Wi Latin for his load.
II
The Mass was dung frae ilka kirk,
The saunts in pieces broke;
The same bell cried the parish in,
An ither words were spoke.
III
He left Delgaty in the haar
An lost the lums o hame;
Ahint him Scotland's eastern coast
Sank laich intil the faem.
IV
At Louvain, whaur the flagstanes rang,
He laid his Scots aside;
At Rome the bishop oiled his hands,
An syne the gate lay wide.
V
The Faither General sent him east
By bog an forest broun,
Till Wilno's kirks o reid brick rose
Abune the timmer toun.
VI
The benches smelt o new-sawn deal,
The lime was wet on stane;
The lords' sons cam in sable furs
To hear a Scot explain.
VII
He taucht them Tully's rules o speech
An Aristotle's lear,
While Wilia froze ablow the brig
Frae Yule till Lent ilk year.
VIII
In June the lift gaed never black;
The gloamin held till morn;
He minded simmer nichts at hame
Abune the Buchan corn.
IX
At Strasbourg, by the high kirk's spire,
They set him face tae face
Wi ane that held the new kirk's creed,
In Latin, case by case.
X
Frae Bordeaux, whaur the wine-ships lie,
He sailed the lang sea-way,
An saw Dundee's auld steeple stand
Abune the firth o Tay.
XI
He gaed up Stirling's castle craig
Past guairds an serving-men;
The King was but a beardless lad,
Weel schuiled wi buik an pen.
XII
He wrote to Rome: Delgaty's wa's
Were risin, flair on flair;
The Hays were biggin for their bairns —
A priest, he had nae heir.
XIII
The preachers read the Word aloud
Frae Bibles Southron-made;
He wantit buiks in Scots, whaur points
O quarrel micht be weighed.
XIV
To Scotland's ministers he pit
His speirs, set oot in prent;
Geneva's Beza answered some,
An ink for ink was spent.
XV
At Tournon, whaur the Rhône rins quick
Aneath the terraced hill,
He clamb the college stair at five
Whan a' the toun lay still.
XVI
Rochelle's great chain gaed ower the port
Atween its towers at nicht;
Ahint it sang the Huguenots
Their Psalms by candle-licht.
XVII
An Jean de Serres took up his pen,
A minister o grace;
Page answered page, an neither man
Wad gie the ither place.
XVIII
At Antwerp, in the printer's shop,
The wet sheets hung in rows;
He turned the Tuscan o Peru
Intil the Latin prose.
XIX
Frae Goa an Japan cam word,
Lang months upon the sea;
Delgaty's name in Latin prent
Was set ablow a' three.
XX
At Pont-à-Mousson by Moselle
They laid him in the clay;
The rain gaed ower Delgaty's wa's,
The new stane turnin grey.
Daniil Lazko
Tuapse, 22 September 2026
Origins
John Hay (1546–1608), known in Latin as Joannes Haius or Hayus, came of the Hays of Delgaty (Delgatie, Dalgetti), a branch of the great Aberdeenshire kindred whose castle stands a little to the east of Turriff, the “Turra” of north-eastern speech. He was a kinsman of the Jesuit Edmund Hay of Megginch, envoy of the Holy See to Mary Queen of Scots. John was fourteen when the Reformation Parliament of 1560 abolished papal authority and forbade the celebration of the Mass, so that he grew up in a Scotland whose parish churches had been turned, within a few years, to the reformed worship.
Studies, the Society of Jesus and Rome
Like many young Scots Catholics of his generation, Hay sought his education abroad. He studied at Paris and at Louvain, entered the Society of Jesus, and was ordained priest in Rome. From that point his career belonged to the international network of Jesuit colleges, in which Latin was the common language of teaching and learned controversy.
Wilno
In 1570 Hay arrived in Wilno (Vilnius), capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, where the Jesuit college had just been founded. There he taught rhetoric and philosophy through the 1570s, during the formative years of the institution. When the college was raised to the rank of an academy in 1579, with the privileges of King Stefan Batory and the confirmation of Pope Gregory XIII, Hay delivered the opening address at its inauguration. The later University of Vilnius thus counts a Scot from Aberdeenshire among the teachers of its first decade. His presence belongs to the wider Scottish presence in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, which ranged from pedlars and merchants to soldiers and scholars, and which Peter Paul Bajer has documented in Scots in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, 16th–18th Centuries (2012).
Strasbourg, 1576
According to the account preserved in the Catholic Encyclopedia, Hay had fallen ill with consumption and was travelling to consult a physician when, in Strasbourg in 1576, he found a Protestant theologian openly challenging Catholics to dispute with him and no one willing to take up the challenge. Hay entered the disputation himself. The identity of his opponent is not securely established. Strasbourg was at that time a Lutheran imperial city, and its great minster served the reformed worship.
The Scottish visit of 1579
In 1579 Hay returned to Scotland, and he described the journey in a letter to Everard Mercurian, General of the Society of Jesus. He sailed from Bordeaux to Dundee and went to the royal court at Stirling Castle, where James VI, then thirteen years old, was being educated. In the same letter he mentioned that his family was busy with building work at Delgatie Castle. The visit brought him face to face with the settled Protestant order of his homeland. The St Andrews SSNE database records that he was commanded to leave Scotland, and that his brother stood caution of £1,000 that he would do so; the record does not date the order, but it most naturally belongs to this visit. The older Catholic tradition adds that his native air restored his health.
Controversy with the ministers of Scotland
The Scottish journey turned Hay into a controversialist addressing his own country. He drew up a long series of questions directed to the ministers of the reformed Kirk of Scotland, published in French as Demandes faictes aux ministres d’Escosse touchant la religion Chrestienne (1583) and in German as Fragstück des Christlichen Glaubens (1586). Théodore de Bèze (Beza), the leading theologian of Geneva, answered thirty-seven of the two hundred and six questions. Hay replied in turn with L’Antimoine aux Responses que Th. de Beze faict à trente sept demandes (1588). Behind this work lay a practical concern that Scotland lacked books in its own tongue for the instruction of the people and for the discussion of disputed points of religion, since the reformed Kirk read its Bibles in English printings.
Tournon and La Rochelle
In France Hay was attached to the Jesuit college at Tournon on the Rhône. From there he carried on long polemics with the Huguenots of La Rochelle, the great Protestant stronghold on the Atlantic coast, and above all with Jean de Serres (c. 1540–1598). De Serres was a Huguenot minister and historian, a scholar of real standing, who in his last years laboured for a reconciliation of the confessions. The exchange was a contest between learned men, conducted in print.
The missions in print
In the Low Countries Hay turned from controversy to editorial and translation work. In 1604 the Antwerp printer Martinus Nutius published his Latin version, De rebus Peruanis, of the Italian report of the Jesuit Diego de Torres Bollo on the missions of Peru. In 1605 Nutius issued Hay’s compilation De rebus Iaponicis, Indicis et Peruanis epistolae recentiores, a single volume of recent Jesuit letters from Japan, India and Peru. Its title page presents the collection as gathered “a Ioanne Hayo Dalgattiensi Scoto Societatis Iesu”: by John Hay, Scot of Delgaty, of the Society of Jesus. Hay never travelled to Asia or America. He knew those lands only through letters, reports and the printing house.
Death
John Hay died in 1608 at Pont-à-Mousson in Lorraine, seat of the Jesuit university founded in 1572, the same institution his kinsman Edmund had once governed as rector.
Chronology
1546
Born into the family of Hay of Delgaty, Aberdeenshire.
1560
Reformation Parliament: papal authority abolished, the Mass forbidden in Scotland.
1560s
Studies at Paris and Louvain; enters the Society of Jesus; ordained priest in Rome.
1570
Arrives in Wilno; teaches rhetoric and philosophy at the Jesuit college.
1576
Theological disputation with a Protestant opponent at Strasbourg.
1579
Opening address at the inauguration of the Academy of Wilno. Voyage from Bordeaux to Dundee; the court at Stirling. Probably at this time ordered to leave Scotland.
1583
Demandes faictes aux ministres d’Escosse.
1586
German version, Fragstück des Christlichen Glaubens.
1588
L’Antimoine, reply to Beza’s answers.
1604
De rebus Peruanis (Antwerp, Martinus Nutius).
1605
De rebus Iaponicis, Indicis et Peruanis epistolae recentiores (Antwerp, Martinus Nutius).
1608
Dies at Pont-à-Mousson.
Genre and intention
The Jesuit o Delgaty is a historical ballad in literary Scots, written in the tradition of the Scottish and Border ballads but not as a pastiche of any one of them. Its subject is a life that is, on its face, unballadlike: a Jesuit scholar, teacher and controversialist whose deeds were lectures, disputations and books. The poem’s central decision is to treat that learned life by the ballad’s own means, through concrete scene, compressed episode, place-name and object, rather than by biography versified. Each of the twenty stanzas holds an image, an action or a movement, and none exists merely to explain who Hay was.
Form and metre
The poem is written in strict Common Measure: twenty quatrains, eighty lines, alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter (8.6.8.6 syllables) and rhyming ABCB. The metre keeps its natural spoken stress throughout. Syllable counts assume ordinary Scots pronunciation: ower is a single syllable, Goa and Wilia two, and General two, as in speech. Place-names are placed so that their natural stress falls on the metrical beat, as in the opening line:
del-GA-ty’s WA’S are THICK an GREY
The rhymes are full rhymes in Scots pronunciation: stane / explain, flair / heir and hame / faem all rhyme on the long Scots vowel, which is itself a quiet mark of the poem’s language. No rhyme word is repeated across the twenty stanzas.
Language
The diction is literary Lowland Scots, anchored in Hay’s own north-east by Turra (the local form of Turriff) and Buchan, and built on the common stock of the Scots tradition: callant, laich, haar, lums, speirs. The poem avoids the two usual failures of modern Scots verse. It is not standard English with Scots words pasted in, since syntax and idiom are Scots as well (An syne the gate lay wide; He wantit buiks in Scots). Nor is it a manufactured “medieval” Scots: every word belongs to the literary tradition from Ramsay and Fergusson onward, and intelligible to a modern Scots reader. The few learned words, such as Tully, Aristotle and Tuscan, belong to Hay’s own world of the Latin school.
Language is also one of the poem’s themes. At Louvain the young Scot laid his Scots aside for Latin, the tongue of the whole learned world. In Wilno the lords’ sons come to hear a Scot explain. Back in Scotland he finds the preachers reading frae Bibles Southron-made and wants buiks in Scots. In Antwerp he turns the Tuscan o Peru / Intil the Latin prose, and his home appears at last as Delgaty’s name in Latin prent. The life is traced as a passage through tongues, and the Scots of the ballad itself quietly restores what the young student put aside.
Composition and geography
The twenty stanzas fall into six movements that follow the historical outline without dates: Delgaty and departure (I–IV); Wilno (V–VIII); Strasbourg and the return to Scotland (IX–XI); the Scottish controversy (XII–XIV); France (XV–XVII); and the world of the missions in print, closing at Pont-à-Mousson (XVIII–XX). The geography widens steadily, from a single road below a castle to Japan, India and Peru, yet it keeps returning to its origin. The widening is the enlargement of one Scottish life rather than a catalogue of destinations.
The structure is held together by a frame of stone. The poem opens on Delgaty’s wa’s … thick an grey. At its centre, in XII, Hay writes to Rome that those walls are risin, flair on flair, a detail taken directly from his letter to Mercurian. It closes with rain falling on the same walls, the new stane turnin grey. The three moments are old stone, new building and weathering, and they make the castle measure the passage of a lifetime without any statement about time.
Motifs
The recurring images remain objects before they become symbols. Walls and stone: Delgaty, the wet lime of the new college in Wilno, the castle crag of Stirling, the towers of La Rochelle. Road and sea: the Turra road, the gate (road) that lay wide after ordination, the haar in which the coast sinks, the lang sea-way from Bordeaux, the months at sea of the mission letters. Bell and worship: the parish bell that calls the people in to hear ither words, the Huguenot psalms sung behind the harbour chain. Ink and print: the questions set oot in prent, the exchange in which ink for ink was spent, the wet sheets hanging in the Antwerp shop. Northern light and season: the haar of Buchan, the white nights of a Lithuanian June set against remembered summer nights at home, the river frozen frae Yule till Lent, the rain of the last stanza.
Adversaries without caricature
The ballad deliberately refuses the polemical temper of its subject’s age. Hay’s opponents are drawn with the dignity of learned men. At Strasbourg the contest is In Latin, case by case. Beza answered some, which is an exact reflection of his thirty-seven answers to two hundred and six questions. Jean de Serres is A minister o grace, where the phrase carries both his office and his character. Their exchange ends in the ballad’s most balanced couplet: Page answered page, an neither man / Wad gie the ither place. The Reformation itself enters through scenes rather than argument: the Mass dung frae ilka kirk, the broken images, the same bell calling the parish to a new service. The Catholic convictions of the protagonist belong to his historical world and are not the thesis of the poem.
Key stanzas
Stanza XII compresses the personal cost of Hay’s vocation into four lines without any statement of feeling. While his kin build for their bairns, the priest has no heir. The dash before the last line is the stanza’s only rhetorical gesture.
Stanza XIX is the imaginative centre of the late movement. The distant missions, which Hay never saw, reach him only as word carried lang months upon the sea, and the whole wider world is gathered under one Scottish place-name: Delgaty’s name in Latin prent / Was set ablow a’ three. The line rests on a documentary fact. The title page of the 1605 volume names Japan, India and Peru, and beneath them the compiler as Ioannes Hayus Dalgattiensis Scotus.
Stanza XX refuses a moral. The death is given in one formulaic ballad couplet, and the final image returns the reader to Aberdeenshire, to rain on the walls and new stone weathering grey. The man went out into the European world, but the poem ends where the stone stays.
History and poetic reconstruction
The narrative keeps to the documented outline. It does not send Hay to the overseas missions, invent miracles, or put fabricated speeches in anyone’s mouth. A few details are declared reconstruction: the smell of new-sawn benches and wet lime in the young college at Wilno (VI), the dawn climb of the college stair at Tournon (XV), and the printer’s shop at Antwerp (XVIII). None contradicts the sources, and each gives bodily presence to a documented fact: the new institution, the teaching life, and the printing of the 1604 and 1605 volumes. Other details are exact rather than decorative. The Bordeaux wine-ships recall the old Scottish claret trade. The steeple of St Mary’s still stands over Dundee. The harbour chain between the towers of La Rochelle is historical. The Tuscan of Peru is the Italian of Torres Bollo’s report, and the Bibles Southron-made are the English Geneva Bibles of the reformed Kirk.
Place in the tradition
The poem’s literary matrix is plain but not imitated: the compression and objectivity of the Child ballads; the gravity and learned undertone of Drummond of Hawthornden; the restrained devotional precision of Alexander Hume; and the idiomatic Lowland speech of Ramsay and Fergusson. Burns is kept at a distance, and there is neither humour nor sentiment of his kind. The result is intended to read as the work of a modern historical balladist, one of a series of Scots ballads by the author on Scots in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Notes on the text
I Turra: Turriff, the market town below Delgaty Castle. callant: lad.
II dung: struck down, driven out (past participle of ding).
III haar: sea mist. lums: chimneys. laich: low. faem: foam, the sea.
IV oiled his hands: the anointing of the hands in the rite of priestly ordination. gate: road.
V reid brick: the Gothic brick churches of Wilno. timmer toun: the largely wooden town.
VII Tully: Cicero, the model of the rhetoric course. lear: learning. Wilia: the river Neris (Polish Wilia).
VIII lift: sky. gloamin: twilight. The white nights of the Baltic June.
IX the high kirk: Strasbourg Minster, then used for Lutheran worship.
X auld steeple: the tower of St Mary’s, Dundee.
XII Based on Hay’s letter to Everard Mercurian (1579). biggin: building. flair: floor, storey.
XIII Southron: English. wantit: both wished for and lacked.
XIV speirs: questions; the Demandes addressed to the ministers of Scotland.
XVI port: harbour, and in Scots also a gate. The chain drawn at night between the harbour towers of La Rochelle.
XVIII the Tuscan o Peru: the Italian report of Diego de Torres Bollo, rendered into Latin as De rebus Peruanis (1604).
XIX ablow a’ three: on the title page of 1605 the name of the compiler, “Dalgattiensis Scotus”, stands beneath the three lands of the title.
Glossary of Scots words
a’ all laich low
abune above lang long
ablow below lear learning
ahint behind licht light
an and lift sky
ane one lums chimneys
aneath beneath micht might
atween between minded remembered
auld old nae no
bairns children nicht, nichts night, nights
biggin building o of
brig bridge oot out
broke broken ower over, across
broun brown pit put
buik, buiks book, books port harbour; also a town gate
callant lad, youth prent print
cam came reid red
clamb climbed rins runs
corn grain, chiefly oats risin rising
craig crag, rock saunts saints; images of saints
deal pine or fir planking schuiled schooled
doun down simmer summer
dung struck down, driven out Southron English
faem foam; the sea speirs questions (from speir, to ask)
faither father spoke spoken
firth estuary stane stone
flagstanes flagstones syne then, thereafter
flair floor, storey tae to
frae from taucht taught
gaed went timmer timber, wooden
gate road, way toun town
gie give turnin turning
gloamin twilight, dusk wa’s walls
guairds guards wad would
haar cold sea mist of the east coast wantit lacked; wished for
hame home weel well
ilk each whan when
ilka every whaur where
intil into wi with
ither other Yule Christmas
kirk church
Sources
Bajer, Peter Paul. Scots in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, 16th–18th Centuries: The Formation and Disappearance of an Ethnic Group. Leiden: Brill, 2012.
Biegańska, Anna. “In Search of Tolerance: Scottish Catholics and Presbyterians in Poland.” Scottish Slavonic Review 17 (1991).
Dempster, Thomas. Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Scotorum. 2nd ed. Edinburgh, 1829, vol. 2.
Forbes-Leith, William. Narratives of Scottish Catholics under Mary Stuart and James VI. London, 1889.
Hay, John. De rebus Iaponicis, Indicis et Peruanis epistolae recentiores. Antwerp: Martinus Nutius, 1605.
Pollen, John Hungerford. “Hay.” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7. New York: Robert Appleton, 1910.
“Hay, John [SSNE 6496].” The Scotland, Scandinavia and Northern European Biographical Database, ed. Steve Murdoch and Alexia Grosjean. University of St Andrews.
“John Hay (Jesuit).” Wikipedia, accessed 22 September 2026.
