Water Newton is situated within Huntingdonshire which is a non-metropolitan district of Cambridgeshire as well as being a historic county of England.

The silver plates and bowls, votive tokens engraved and embossed with the labarum (the chi-rho cross), and an unengraved standing two-handled cup of the form (cantharus) later used as chalices comprise the earliest group of Christian liturgical silver yet found in the Roman Empire.

In 1085, William the Conqueror ordered that a survey should be carried out across his kingdom to discover who owned which parts and what it was worth.

[4] The Domesday Book does not explicitly detail the population of a place but it records that there were 22 households at Water Newton.

The Domesday Book uses a number of units of measure for areas of land that are now unfamiliar terms, such as hides and ploughlands.

In different parts of the country, these were terms for the area of land that a team of eight oxen could plough in a single season and are equivalent to 120 acres (49 hectares); this was the amount of land that was considered to be sufficient to support a single family.

[4] The tax assessment in the Domesday Book was known as geld or danegeld and was a type of land-tax based on the hide or ploughland.

For Water Newton the highest tier of local government is Cambridgeshire County Council which has administration buildings in Cambridge.

[10] Water Newton is part of the electoral division of Norman Cross[8] and is represented on the county council by two councillors.

In the period 1801 to 1901 the population of Water Newton was recorded every ten years by the UK census.