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 about disenchanting everything, scrubbing away the marks of human freedom until only the naked will remains.
Scruton’s defense of England’s institutions flows directly from this oikophilic impulse. The Crown, the Church of England, the common law, the countryside itself—far above “relics,” these were living embodiments of a shared identity. The monarchy, for all its ceremonial quaintness, anchored the nation in a continuity that no election could provide; the established Church, with its reticent Anglicanism, offered a spiritual home that was national without being nationalistic, tolerant without being indifferent. The landscape—those hedgerows and chalk downs, the villages clustered around their parish churches—was not mere scenery but the visible form of a moral order. And the common law, that slow accretion of precedent and precedent, embodied the English genius for compromise and the rule of law over the rule of men.
Against these, Scruton set the “unenchanted modernity” that had demoralized the world. Liberalism, in its abstract form, had reduced persons to rights-bearing atoms and communities to aggregates of choice; modernism in the arts and architecture had replaced beauty with novelty, and tradition with the cult of the new. In place of the enchanted England of fox-hunting, choral evensong, and the tranquil rhythms of the agricultural year, there had arisen a rootless, bureaucratic order that knew the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Yet England: An Elegy has not passed without criticism, and Scruton himself would have wished us to face it squarely, for he was never one to flinch from honest dissent. Some reviewers, with justice, noted the selective nature of his portrait. The England that he evoked often resembled the pastoral idyll of George Orwell’s 1940s more than the multicultural, urban reality of the turn of the millennium. It was an England of market towns and cathedral closes, of huntsmen and choirboys—an England that many readers, especially those in the great conurbations or from newer communities, found hard to recognize as their own.
What is more, critics spoke of an “exclusionary” vision: Scruton’s emphasis on an inherited national identity, rooted in Christian heritage and a particular way of being at home, seemed to imply that those who did not share that heritage—Catholics shaped by Rome, Muslims formed by the ummah, Jews by centuries of diaspora—could not fully belong unless they set aside vital parts of themselves.
Yet others accused Scruton of “home-idolatry,” of elevating the particular love of place into a quasi-religious absolute. Moving on to wording issues, there were charges of historical misreading: Scruton’s tendency to speak of “English” achievements when the imperial story was British, and to draw a sharp line between the island’s skepticism of revolutionary ideologies and the more continental enthusiasms of Europe. Nevertheless, Melvyn Bragg, no political ally, conceded the book’s aesthetic power, calling it “elegant and moving.” The prose, at least, united admirers and detractors alike.
What these criticisms miss, however, is the very quality that makes Scruton’s Englishness so distinctive: its character as islandness. Apart from a geographical entity, “England”, in his telling, denotes a state of mind—an island consciousness that has always kept a certain distance from the revolutionary fervors of the continent. Unlike so-called “bigotry” or “xenophobia”, this reflects a prudent wariness born of history: the English, Scruton reminds us, have resisted the grand abstractions of the French or the ideological tempests of the Germans precisely because they have loved their home too well to gamble it on utopian schemes.
Scruton’s vision lingers on the rural landscape, on the ritual of the hunt (that most English of pursuits, blending sport, tradition, and a respect for the living world), and on a non-enthusiastic Anglicanism that prefers the Book of Common Prayer to the excitements of revivalism. It is a vision that deliberately detaches English identity from the broader, often imperial, story of the United Kingdom, focusing instead on the intimate, the local, the inherited. In doing so, Scruton was not denying the complexities of Britishness; he was insisting that Englishness has its own irreducible core, one worth defending for the sake of anybody who chooses to make this island their home.
England: An Elegy, then, ranks as a central text in what we might call Scruton’s oikophilic conservatism—a conservatism that does not merely conserve institutions but seeks to re-enchant them, to restore to them the aura of belonging that makes them lovable. It is a book written in full awareness that the civilization that it celebrates is passing, yet it refuses despair. For Scruton, the act of lamentation itself was an act of hope: by naming what is lost, we prepare ourselves to recover it in new forms. The defense of home is never finished; it must be renewed in every generation through the patient work of education, art, neighborly courtesy, and law.
If we turn from the England of 2000 to the Britain that has unfolded since Scruton’s death in January 2020, one cannot help but wonder what he would have made of it. He left us just as the final Brexit bells tolled and the first lockdowns began—two events that, in their different ways, spoke of sovereignty regained and liberty curtailed. The years that followed have brought restrictions on citizens’ freedom of expression that would have struck him as profoundly un-English: the steady creep of hate-speech laws, the chilling effect of online regulation, the cancellation of speakers and the policing of opinion in ways that treat dissent not as the lifeblood of a free people but as a public danger.
The common-law tradition that Scruton so revered—slow, particular, protective of the individual against the state—has been overlaid by abstract codes that prize feelings over facts and group sensitivities over individual rights. At the same time, warnings of civil war, once confined to the fringes, have become the anxious refrain of serious commentators: riots in northern towns, the visible strains of parallel societies, the sense that mass immigration without cultural integration has tested the very oikophilia that once made England a home for newcomers as well as natives.
Scruton would not have rejoiced in these warnings; he was too courteous, too measured for schadenfreude. Yet he would have seen in them the melancholy confirmation of the elegy that he wrote two decades earlier. The unenchanted modernity that he diagnosed has borne its fruit: a society that no longer knows how to love its home and therefore finds itself divided against itself.
Scruton would, I suspect, have urged us not to despair but to recover the habit of oikophilia—to teach again the love of the particular, the local, the inherited; to defend the institutions that still whisper of continuity; and to remember that freedom of expression is not a luxury but the very condition of a civilization that values truth over comfort.
In the quiet of his study, surrounded by the books and music and landscapes that he loved, Scruton taught us that an elegy need not be the last word. It can be the first note of a renewal, sounded in the minor key, but sung with hope. England may yet be re-enchanted—if enough of us remember how to love her.
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