Living Outside of Love

Charity and hospitality are perhaps the most well-recognized components of caritas in the historiography. This chapter explores the hospitality offered to the itinerant poor in Scotland, highlighting how the practice of charitable giving enabled the reincorporation of a group that lived on the edges of community. Many of these people lived outside of formal family structures because of the legal practice of banishment following criminal activity. This chapter also explores this formal process of exclusion and how providing hospitality not only allowed such people to survive but also acted as an opportunity to encourage moral reform. Those who lived in the margins were often thought of as ‘lonely’, structurally distanced from the connections that brought comfort and security, and pushed to locations—the spaces between towns and villages—imagined as lonely. Importantly, as caritas was an embodied ethic, punishment here was imagined in physical, not just symbolic, terms.