Newton's rooms in Trinity

Abstract

The Great Court was built about 350 years ago. Since then many of the rooms in it must have been occupied at one time or another by men of great distinction, but we have no official records until fairly recently to show where they lived. W e know when they came up and went down, we know their tutor and what degree they took, but their rooms are not listed and in most cases we have nothing but tradition or references in their biographies or letters. However there is at least one staircase that we can be sure about and that is letter E , Great Court, between the Chapel and the Great Gate. Macaulay, Thackeray and J. G. Frazer lived there in the nineteenth century and in the seventeenth Isaac Newton certainly lived in the rooms on the first floor next to the Great Gate.