The earliest example of modern notation is to be seen in the Winchester Cathedral. It is the setting of a prayer, and is supposed to have been written in 1016 A.D. England also claims to have furnished the first example of contrapuntal composition,--a four-voiced canon with two free _bassi_, written in, or prior to, 1240. If this be authentic, it is a phenomenon, like "thunder out of a clear sky," for there was not at that time, nor for three hundred years afterwards, any manifest scientific tendency in England's musical methods. This piece may have been a direct or indirect product of the Flanders school, of which Huchbold was the progenitor. This learned priest, who strove to materialize and co-ordinate musical means (not its spirit), may be taken as an index of the intellectual bent of his time in the Netherlands, whose people, undaunted by human foes, or by the more merciless sea, which was a perpetual menace to their very existence, devoted much attention to the development of the arts and sciences and to building up industries. Their intelligent and persistent enterprise walled out the North Sea and made it a tractable servant, and created on those reclaimed marshes a civilization which for several hundred years represented the highest attainments of man. This earnestness of character and high culture were congenial elements to the growth of music, and there is abundant evidence that their complement, a distinct sense for sound expression, was not wanting, for Taine, in his "Art in the Netherlands," says, "Other people cultivate music; to them it seems an instinct." It is not strange that this instinct, coupled with the perpetuated spirit of Huchbold, should have produced a formulated art at that propitious stage in music's evolution. Music itself had become a ripe impulse, ready and waiting for just such conditions. The Flanders school adjusted tone relationships and invented counterpoint and canon. John Osteghem and his pupil Despres were the greatest masters of that initial school, which for nearly two centuries, beginning with the middle of the fourteenth, furnished all the European courts with singers, instrumentalists, and composers. Their more elaborate music was written for the Church, and a damper was consequently put upon production by the Reformation, which greatly simplified religious observances and closed choir doors to the composers of ambitious works. Before the development of opera and the institution of the concert orchestra and chorus, the Church was the sole patron of high musical endeavor. Fortunately, the Netherlands musicians had forestalled the calamitous results of this religious revolution through the establishment of conservatories of music in Venice and Naples. They transplanted their knowledge and high aspirations into sunny and Catholic Italy, where they flourished and bore fruit after their native land had ceased to be musically supreme.