Monastic architecture as such, the conception, that is, and the detailed designing and building of the fabric of monastery and church, lies outside the scope of these chapters. No department of monastic antiquities has been more fully and, in general, more adequately treated. Moreover, the period in which monastic architecture influenced all ecclesiastical building, and the somewhat later epoch in which the plan of the great black and white monk abbey was finally evolved and standardized, were alike over before 1216. Indeed, by that time, or at least by c. 1260, the vernal burst of bloom was over. The cathedrals and abbeys of England and Wales were in existence with all their main dimensions as we know them now, and save in a very few cases the additions made between 1250 and 1540, great as was their effect upon the external appearance, consisted almost entirely in reclothing the existing fabric, in adding screens, stalls and chapels, and in augmenting the number of towers or repairing those already in existence. Yet though it is not easy to recall a single occasion, after the building of Salisbury, on which a medieval architect had such a clear field and great commission as have since been given to a Wren, a Pugin, a Scott or a Lutyens, yet the sum total of building, even in the monastic churches alone, was very large, and in some cases the work was all but continuous.