Nature, and Nature's Laws lay hide in Night.
God said, Let Newton be! and All was Light.
ALEXANDER POPE ¹

In the days before the English Civil War, Woolsthorpe was a
peaceful Lincolnshire village, and even when, for a time, the
world seemed turned upside down by internecine struggle the
village survived the traumas almost unscathed. A few hundred
yards beyond the village, up on the Great North Road (today the
Al), the soldiers of the King and those of Parliament clanked
their way towards cannon blast and bloody death during the bleak
winter of 1642-3; but few men from the village became
embroiled in the fighting, and the nearest battles were several miles
away.

Woolsthorpe (or Wulsthorpe as it was once known) is an ancient
settlement, nestled in a hollow on the west side of the river Witham,
about seven miles from the nearest sizeable town, Grantham. New-
ton's first biographer, William Stukeley, described the village as hav-
ing a good prospect eastwards, with a view of the Roman road and
the Hermen-Street going over the fields to the east of Colsterworth:
'There can be no finer country than this,' he declared. ²

During the seventeenth century, Woolsthorpe was little more than
a collection of small farms and humble country dwellings clustered
around the manor house. The area offered poor opportunities as
arable land and would sustain only a two-field rotation, which meant
that fields were left fallow half the time, so the locals eked out a
frugal existence largely from sheep farming.

The Newtons, of which there were many scattered around the
Grantham region, had for several generations before Isaac's birth
been viewed as being one cut above the local populace, existing on

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