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The term common law does not mean unwritten law.

Oh, and for rebuttal to this point, I give you James Madison. You may have heard of him.

What can he mean by saying that the Common law is not secured by the new constitution, though it has been adopted by the State Constitutions. The common law is nothing more than the unwritten law, and is left by all the constitutions equally liable to legislative alterations.

You will find many references to the common law as including unwritten law. The reason is that when judges were deciding cases and creating the common law they were not comfortable explicitly stating that they were in fact making those laws. Instead, when asked why they were stating a rule that no one else had ever heard of, they explained that these rules actually had roots in ancient traditions, etc. If anyone asked where the average person might find a list of those ancient traditions, they were told that they were unwritten ancient traditions and could not actually be found anywhere. Of course, that sort of raised the question as to how the judge could have learned about the ancient unwritten traditions and there never was a satisfactory answer to that question.

The fact is that courts were required to devise rules for problems that were not covered by statutes. They had to devise rules to decide real cases in front of them. And, that's what they did. The notion that they were divining ancient traditions, etc. was just their little way of providing themselves with legitimacy.

At the present time, you will not find any judges pretending to be applying ancient unwritten traditions to decide cases. Increasingly, there are more statutes to cover more problems and there is of course more case law (common law precedents) to handle questions not covered by statutes. But, if they cannot find any statute or precedent to resolve a question now, they are more open about the fact that they are in fact creating the rule that they apply.

I know that you are also interested in what is called natural law. Check out this article on common law, natural law, and how courts function. There is even a mention or two of the law of equity, which has more religious roots.