Church of St Peter and St Paul

The Church of Saints Peter and Paul in the market town of Eye, Suffolk, is a Grade I listed building whose west tower Nikolaus Pevsner called "one of the wonders of Suffolk" — a hundred-foot pinnacle of flint flushwork rising over one of the county's ancient boroughs. The only Anglican church in the town, it stands just east of the old mound of Eye Castle, and its richly carved interior, medieval painted screen and twentieth-century work by Sir Ninian Comper make it one of the most rewarding parish churches in the region. Christians may have worshipped hereabouts for a thousand years: a church near this site is recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086, and Eye Priory once stood some four hundred metres to the east, beyond the River Dove.

The present church is mainly of the early fourteenth century, with fifteenth-century additions, and its oldest surviving part is the south porch, part of which may date to the late thirteenth century. The total length of the building is just under 121 feet. But the glory of Eye is its tower. Pevsner's "wonder of Suffolk" rises 101 feet, faced from top to bottom on its west side with flint flushwork — the East Anglian craft of setting knapped flint and dressed stone in decorative patterns — and bears the arms of John de la Pole, 2nd Duke of Suffolk. Long thought to be of the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, the tower's date was confirmed by a dendrochronological survey: of ten timbers sampled, eight formed a group most likely felled together around 1466–70, anchoring the great tower firmly in the third quarter of the fifteenth century. Its belfry holds a ring of eight bells, two of them inscribed "Miles Gray made me in 1640".

The fabric is full of small histories. The priest's door in the south chancel wall is unusual in being entered beneath a flying buttress; still visible outside, it was blocked internally in 1911 when the south-east chapel — now the Lady Chapel — was remodelled for divine service as a memorial to Frederic Waite, for thirteen and a half years churchwarden of the parish. The two-storey fifteenth-century south porch, contemporary with the tower and likewise bearing the de la Pole arms, has above it an unused parvise chamber, while its inner doorway into the church is earlier, probably thirteenth-century. Inside the porch stands a brick dole table with a stone top, given by Henry Cutler in 1601 — the place where debts, tithes and church dues were paid and where money or bread was distributed to the poor of the parish, a rare survival of an everyday medieval function carved with its donor's name.

The monuments span the Tudor age. Two almost identical sixteenth-century altar-tombs of Purbeck marble face each other across the church: a canopied tomb at the west end of the north aisle for Nicholas Cutler (died 1568), Member of Parliament for Liverpool, and Elionora Cutler (died 1549), daughter of the herald John Mynne, originally in the sanctuary but later moved to block the old north door; and another canopied tomb at the north side of the Lady Chapel altar for William Honnyng (died 1569), a Parliamentarian who had served as Clerk of the Signet and Clerk of the Privy Council. Behind the high altar, beneath the great east window, an intricately carved reredos of Caen stone, alabaster and marble shows Christ ascending into heaven attended by His eleven disciples, designed by the vicar John Pritchitt, carved by Hems & Sons of Exeter, and erected in 1908 in memory of Major the Honourable Edward Reginald Bateman-Hanbury. A mid-fourteenth-century tomb recess in the north aisle wall now shelters Lough Pendred's "Shrine of Our Lady", carved in wood in 1973.

Eye's church bears the scars of the Reformation's iconoclasm. Like many Suffolk and Cambridgeshire churches it suffered at the hands of William Dowsing, the Parliamentary commissioner nicknamed "Smasher Dowsing", whose journal records his visit: "266. Eaye, Aug. 30. 7 superstitious pictures in the chancel, and a cross; one was Mary Magdalen; all in the glass; and 6 in the church windows; many more had been broke down afore." Yet the church's greatest medieval treasure survived him. The painted panels at the base of the rood screen, thought to date from about 1480, depict fifteen figures of saints — most of them martyrs — together with several English monarchs, and most have come through the centuries in remarkable condition. From left to right they include St Helen, mother of Constantine; St Edmund, King of East Anglia, murdered by Danish invaders at Hoxne in 870; St Ursula sheltering her virgins beneath her mantle; the uncanonised King Henry VI, who died in the Tower in 1471; St Dorothy with her basket of fruit and flowers; St Barbara with her tower; St Agnes with the sword through her throat and the lamb of her purity; St Edward the Confessor; St John the Apostle with the winged serpent rising from his poisoned chalice; St Catherine with her wheel; William of Norwich; St Lucy with her eyes on a platter; St Thomas of Canterbury; and St Cecilia, patroness of musicians. The screen itself is reputed to have come from Great Massingham Priory in Norfolk, an Augustinian house dissolved in 1538, and the underside of its rood loft is painted gold-on-blue with stars and flowers, its arches descending to angelic figures that face the high altar.

The major restoration of the building came in 1869 under J. K. Colling, whose octagonal font is particularly admired. But it was the twentieth century, and the great Anglo-Catholic architect Sir Ninian Comper, who gave the church its present richness. Comper's re-ordering of the 1920s and 1930s added the rood loft to the surviving fourteenth-century screen, with its Rood crucifix, figures of the Virgin and St John, six-winged seraphim and serpents of evil at the foot of the cross (1925); re-ordered the sanctuary and decorated the chancel roof and the "canopy of honour" over the rood; and designed the great east window. That window depicts the Risen Christ flanked by St John, St Peter, St Paul and — unusually — St Polycarp, a tribute to John Polycarp Oakey, parish priest of Eye who died in 1926: the figure of St Polycarp is in fact a portrait of the late Reverend Oakey, shielded by the saint's chasuble, the window funded by his family and friends. In 1932 Comper added the graceful font cover at the west end of the nave. The names of the parish's vicars and patrons have been recorded since 1138.

The church has continued to evolve into the present century. Archaeological survey in 2009, ahead of re-ordering the north-east of the building, revealed six brick-lined graves of probable eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century date, and the work created the Abbey Room — kitchen, meeting and robing space — while the former Lady Chapel, dedicated to Santa Maria del Popolo, is now divided from the chancel and north aisle by screens of limed oak installed in 1969. Over the last century and a half the church has developed and maintained a traditionally Anglo-Catholic pattern of worship, with a particular emphasis on the sacraments and the celebration of the Eucharist, enhanced by a strong musical tradition that continues today.

From a Domesday church beside a Norman castle to a fifteenth-century flushwork tower that is the pride of Suffolk, a screen of medieval saints that outlasted Smasher Dowsing, and the glowing twentieth-century work of Ninian Comper, Saints Peter and Paul gathers six centuries of East Anglian church-craft into one building — a Grade I treasure at the heart of the little borough of Eye, and still its living parish church.