Meditations On An Elegy |
Meditations On An Elegy
Roger Scruton was a man in love, for he loved England, his home; decent and gentle in character, he would have renounced the self-righteous joy of a prophet proven right in his premonitions of the future.
Lars Møller | April 11, 2026
From Wikimedia Commons: Osmington: A View to the Village (John Fisher, Bishop of Salisbury, between 1816 and 1832)
In England: An Elegy, published in the year 2000, Sir Roger Scruton offered the reading public a love-letter written in the minor key—a philosophical and deeply personal lament for a country that he knew was slipping away. With the quiet authority of one who had walked its lanes, hunted across its fields, and sat in its parish churches, he set down a defense of Englishness that was at once conservative and enchanted. Here was no mere nostalgia for a lost past, but an act of piety: the recognition that a civilization is defined by the things that it chooses to remember, and that England’s memory was being effaced by the very forces claiming to liberate it.
To read the book today is to feel the warmth of Scruton’s prose still radiating from the page, a prose that moves like the slow swell of the Severn or the measured toll of evensong—measured, yes, but never cold. It is written out of love, and it asks its reader, gently yet insistently, to love in return.
At the heart of the elegy lies the concept that Scruton made peculiarly his own: oikophilia, the love of home. Not the abstract love of “humanity,” nor the rootless cosmopolitan’s affection for everywhere and nowhere, but the particular, rooted affection for the place that has shaped us and that we, in turn, are called to shape. England, for Scruton, was not an idea but a home—a settlement of manners, landscapes, and institutions that had grown organically across the centuries. To be English was to inherit a sense of belonging that was both given and earned: given through the unassuming inheritance of custom and landscape, earned through the daily labor of maintaining it.
Scruton saw his oikophilia threatened on every side—by the bureaucratic abstractions of European integration, by the modernist impatience with the past, and by a liberal ideology that treated national identity as a prejudice to be overcome rather than a gift to be cherished. The main idea echoing through England: An Elegy is that home—rootedness, belonging—is vital to our well-being as human beings. It is the place where we are not strangers, where the world makes sense, and where our actions fit into a meaningful order. Modernity, by contrast, has set........