 Modern historians and editors of Bede have been lavish in their praise of his achievement in the Historia Ecclesiastica . Stenton regarded it as one of the " small class of books which transcend all but the most fundamental conditions of time and place " , and regarded its quality as dependent on Bede 's " astonishing power of co @-@ ordinating the fragments of information which came to him through tradition , the relation of friends , or documentary evidence ... In an age where little was attempted beyond the registration of fact , he had reached the conception of history . " Patrick Wormald described him as " the first and greatest of England 's historians " . 
