Until 17th century, the property of any object to "fall", was considered natural, and no further studies were made over it. It wasn’t until Sir Isaac Newton and some other scientists, especially Robert Hooke that this property was considered as a subject of study. They thought that the weight of a body had to be considered as an attraction force between the Earth and the object.
Also, the laws that rule the stellar bodies’ motion were considered completely different from the laws that rule the motion of objects on Earth’s surface. The planetary motions, especially the sun’s, was subject of special interest of the students at Cambridge University in 1664. In 1665, the black plague stroke England, and all the schools were closed and the students were sent to home. One of them was Isaac Newton who, at his home in Woolsthorpe, continued his studies about all this matters. He realized that the same force that attracts an apple towards Earth could also attract the Moon. The idea of same laws ruling object’s motion on the Earth’s surface and planetary motion was an outrage and broke every stated principle.
Galileo had been called to stand trial by the Inquisition and forced to give up all his discoveries about free fall and planetary motion. He revised and confirmed Copernicus’ theory in which Earth orbited around the sun. This statement contradicted Aristotle’s theory about stellar bodies orbiting around a static Earth. He also changed the accepted theory about free fall that established that the speed at which an object falls was proportional to its weight. We now know that any object falls (free fall) always at the same speed, regardless of its mass or shape.
But those times are over, so the new theories instead of been rejected, were revised and accepted.