After undertaking such a study, Jefferson arrived at a very curious conclusion; that at a time which was not buried in a mythological past, the Anglo-Saxons had lived under customs and unwritten laws based upon the natural rights of man and permitting the individual to develop freely, normally and happily. In the course of time, these free institutions deteriorated through the nefarious influences of several agencies. Unwritten law became written law and jurists succeeded in concealing under their sophistry and verbiage the primitive intent of natural legislation. Priests, striving to extend their domination over a realm which primitively was foreign to them, introduced religious prescriptions into civil laws and thus diminished the rights of the individual. Conquerors and a long lineage of hereditary kings further modified primitive institutions in order to provide an apparently legal foundation for their usurpations, until the people, no longer able to withstand patiently the evils of tyranny, arose and recovered at least some of their rights.
Such a conspectus of the history of England was neither new nor original; it was one of the favorite contentions of English jurists during the eighteenth century, and nowhere perhaps is it more forcibly developed than in the last chapter of Blackstone's "Commentaries", "Of the rise, progress and gradual improvements of the laws of England." It is fundamentally also the doctrine of Jefferson, who went much farther than any of the English political thinkers in his revindication of the Saxon liberties.
One may see already how such a conception differs from the theories of Rousseau and the French philosophers, and indeed from those of the English philosophers. And this is easily explained, even if too seldom realized. Born in the eighteenth century, Jefferson is in some respects a man of the eighteenth century, but no greater mistake could be made than to apply to him the same standards that apply to European political thinkers. The very fact that he was born and grew up in a remote colony prevented him from joining any particular school of political philosophy. He had comparatively few books at his disposal, certainly fewer gazettes, and only faint echoes of the philosophical battles raging in Europe reached the capital of Virginia. During the long winter evenings at Shadwell, he had ample time to think, to sift from the books he was reading, not matter of passing interest, but matter of practical value and principles susceptible of being applied to the society which he knew and in which he lived. He could not have the cosmopolitan and universal outlook of thinkers who had traveled and met with representatives of many nationalities. His "Literary Bible", as well as his "Commonplace Book", contains many examples which might be used to illustrate his provincialism or, if one prefers, his regionalism.