Regarding King Talymar missing from the list of Mercian monarchs & Morganna’s comment about Bede

Bede’s work The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation is one of the primary sources of information on this period of history. Finished in 731, it would have been available to young Wiglaf in 826. At the time, Bede’s work would have been taken as ‘gospel’ except by those folks/monarchs who were on the ‘outs’ – usually pagans and non-Northumbrians. In particular, Bede had no love for the Mercians:

In spite of Mercia’s political position in the late seventh and early eighth centuries, remarkably few Mercian primary sources have survived. No Mercian chronicle or other narrative source exists . . .. Bede’s Northumbrian sympathies have also affected his treatment of Mercian history and one example of this is his reticence about the extent of Mercian overlordship in the second half of the seventh century. (Yorke, 2013, p.100)

Bede’s history is revisionist and selective about whom he did and did not write about in his history. Bede (Stevens & Giles translation, 1958) confirms this in his own words as he writes, “Hence it has been agreed by all who have written about the reigns of the kings, to abolish the memory of those perfidious monarchs, and to assign that [those] years to the reign of the following king . . ..” Bede then proceeded to talk of King Oswald of Northumbria “a man most beloved by God” (p. 104). This leaves us with the insinuation that the king(s) whose memory was abolished was not a Christian.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Peterborough/ Laud Chronicle) also mentions skipping over short ruled kings and leaving out non-Christians. In discussing the same King Oswald of Northumbria, who the Chronicle acknowledges ruled eight years: “the ninth year was assigned to him on account of the heathen practices which had been performed by those who had reigned that one year between him and Edwin” (p. 27).

Castleden (2001) also blatantly refers to Bede as political “revisionist” (p.19) preferring to put Roman Catholicism in a better light than reporting accurate history:

Bede, who piously expunged apostates…and seems also to have deliberately suppressed details of short or joint reigns in order to produce an orderly sequence. Some kings are known mainly from charters, of which several are forgeries, while others have been subjected to tampering in order to reconcile them with the erroneous king lists of chroniclers, baffled by blanks, and confused by concurrent reigns and kings with similar or identical names. Even modern historians are tempted to fill out the blank prehistoric period with mythological creatures, combine kings with similar names, and suppress multiple kingship, or at least reduce it down to some regular dyarchy. (List of Monarchs of Kent, 2015, p. 1)

It is into these selective gaps in the lineages, left by The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, which, even given an honest attempt to accurately list monarchs and assign years to their reigns, is at best sketchy, that the reigns of Talymar ‘Thridacyning’ have been inserted.