The Old Palace at Hatfield was built around 1485 for John Morton, bishop of Ely and later archbishop of Canterbury. Its brick ranges enclosed a courtyard beside the bishops' park, combining a great hall, chapel, kitchens, lodgings, and service rooms. The use of brick and decorative chimneys reflected elite building fashions of late medieval England. Although called a palace, it functioned as an episcopal residence supported by estates, servants, officials, tenants, and the productive landscape of Hatfield rather than as a fortified royal castle.

Henry VIII acquired Hatfield from the bishopric in 1538 during the Reformation and made it a royal property. His children Edward and Elizabeth spent important periods there, educated within households designed both to honor and supervise heirs to the throne. Elizabeth's status shifted sharply as her parents' marriage was annulled and court politics changed, yet Hatfield remained one of the places associated with her upbringing. The palace's rooms and gardens formed the practical setting for study, worship, exercise, correspondence, and the constant observation expected of a Tudor princess.

According to enduring tradition, Elizabeth learned of Mary I's death and her own accession in November 1558 while in Hatfield's park, near the tree later called the Queen Elizabeth Oak. Whether every detail of the familiar scene can be verified, Hatfield was unquestionably central to the transition. Elizabeth met councillors there before traveling to London and beginning a reign that transformed the palace's historical reputation. The surviving hall consequently carries an association with political decision-making as well as royal childhood.

James I exchanged Hatfield with his chief minister Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, in 1607. Cecil considered the medieval palace outdated and built the great Jacobean house nearby. Three sides of the old courtyard were demolished, while the surviving range, including the great hall, was retained for service and estate uses. This selective destruction created the relationship seen today: a fragment of a late medieval episcopal and Tudor palace standing beside an early seventeenth-century aristocratic residence built by the family that still owns the estate.

The remaining range has been repaired and adapted repeatedly for gatherings and other uses. Restoration preserves brickwork, timber roofs, windows, and internal volumes while acknowledging that the Old Palace is only part of the original complex. Its significance lies in institutional change visible on one estate: medieval bishops, Tudor royal children, Elizabeth's accession, and Cecil's Jacobean reordering. Hatfield also illustrates how survival can depend on utility. The range endured not because every generation treated it as a museum, but because it remained useful within a working household and landscape.