Excursions 2012
SIAH 2013 010 Bu A SIAH 2012 00 Bu A 31 1 1 10 20 12 127 EXCURSIONS 2012 Report and notes on some findings 21 April. Clive Paine and Edward Martin Eye church and castle Eye, Church of St Peter and St Paul (Clive Paine) (by kind permission of Fr Andrew Mitchell). A church dedicated to St Peter was recorded at Eye in 1066. The church was endowed with 240 acres of glebe land, a sure indication that this was a pre-Conquest minster church, with several clergy serving a wide area around Eye. The elliptical shaped churchyard also suggests an Anglo-Saxon origin. Robert Malet, lord of the extensive Honour of Eye, whose father William had built a castle here by 1071, founded a Benedictine priory c. 1087, also dedicated to St Peter, as part of the minster church. It seems that c. 1100–5 the priory was re-established further to the east, at the present misnamed Abbey Farm. It is probable that at the same time the parish church became St Peter and St Paul to distinguish itself from the priory. The oldest surviving piece of the structure is the splendid early thirteenth-century south doorway with round columns, capitals with stiff-leaf foliage, and dog-tooth carving around the arch. The doorway was reused in the later rebuilding of the church, a solitary surviving indication of the high-status embellishment of the early building. The mid fourteenth-century rebuilding was undertaken by the Ufford family of Parham, earls of Suffolk, who were lords of the Honour of Eye 1337–82.
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