Our board was laid out to use SPI2, but our programmer found this in the G120/G120E data sheet:
8.6 SPI Channels
SPI2 is shared internally with the flash memory on the G120. Use of a chip select with devices on this channel is required or the G120 will not function properly. The use of another SPI channel is recommended.
Based on this and the responses in this thread, we decided to modify our board and use SPI3 for the Ethernet controller interface.
We had the same exception using SPI2.