St Peter & St Paul
This church in Eye is one of the most beautifully decorated in Suffolk both on the inside and out, including the very rare; complete rood screen, and is perfectly suited to the historic town.
This is a beautifully well-looked after church, an excellent example of a later-medieval perpendicular gothic church in East Anglia; and is really a charming display of impressive architecture for an historically wealthy town in this part of Suffolk. Firstly the visitor’s eye is drawn to the large tower (101 ft), which exhibits flint flushwork in panelling from the bottom to the top. On the western face we see five sets of windows, including a large four-light window just above the door, with appropriately decorative tracery and a frieze of shields below it (a frieze is a horizontal panel of decorative stonework). At the top are the battlements and rounded pinnacles, topping off this imposing structure. Immediately we can see that there was lots of money around the town at the time of construction and put into the church as a display of wealth and influence because the extensive use of knapped flint on the tower and stone ornaments are sparse in other smaller churches.
Looking from the South, we can see the aisle in the perpendicular style decorated with battlements, gargoyles and flint flushwork on the buttresses. But the two-storey porch is more noteworthy, as we can see vertical brick panelling instead of flint (probably Jacobean or late 16th century). Unlike in other East Anglian churches, where flint flushwork is common for the front of porches, Eye solely uses stone- suggesting the benefactors were keen to project the church and by extension the town as somewhere important. Also interestingly, is the two large polygonal buttresses, finished with brickwork at the top. The smaller details are always important when investigating churches: for instance the ornamental friezes display decorative quatrefoils (leaf-like designs with four lobes or leaves), and the Tudor portcullis also visible on the lower buttress. This portcullis addition was probably to show loyalty to the new dynasty after the locally dominate de la Pole family (their shield is visible on the tower) fell out of favour with the king at the end of the 15th century.
Inside, this church is full of colour and architectural gems. The arcades have fairly slender octagonal piers, which was becoming a fashionable style in the late medieval period to move away from the heavier Norman and early gothic influences. Immediately entering we see the magnificent rood screen which is really the best part of the church, since this screen dating from 1480 is the only screen with a restored loft in Suffolk. At the bottom we can see depictions of saints including St Edmund of East Anglia and also of King Henry VI, these were cleaned but not re-touched in the 1960s, so are themselves probably many centuries old. The amazing colour of the screen is complimented by the painted angel corbels on the roof and the imposing crucifix above it, these and the stained glass of various ages bring together a vibrant and majestic feeling inside.
St Peter and St Paul is a truly charming and magnificent church. The perpendicular gothic architecture is excellently displayed here and Eye has unique features that we don’t see very often in East Anglia: for instance just the tower has original distinctive ornamental decorations that really makes it stand out. And on the inside the complete rood screen is very rare, but the beautiful painting makes the interior colourful and ornate to an extent that it is unique in the area and truly a magnificent gem that is appropriate for the historic architecture found in the town. Located south of Diss I highly encourage you to visit this charming church as it really is a stunning piece of architecture in this part of Suffolk close to the border.
The roof can be probably described as a rounded hammerbeam roof, where we can see the plain wooden corbels of faces at the bottom of the beams and the wooden angels at the top of the nave wall. But what is interesting is that above the last pair of windows, the roof has been beautifully repainted in what we can assume is the original paintwork style, showing the magnificence of late medieval interior design.
