The Canterbury Tales has been edited regularly since Caxton's first edition in 1476 [Cx1], but it was only in the nineteenth century that serious discussion of the textual problems commenced. This debate was inspired by the renewed interest in textual and antiquarian studies as well as by the discovery of the Ellesmere [El] and Hengwrt [Hg] manuscripts. From then on El became most editors’ base manuscript. The Chaucer Society published studies on the poem's text and issued transcripts of early Canterbury Tales manuscripts considered central to the textual tradition. Apart from El and Hg, these included Cambridge University Library MSS Gg 4.27 [Gg] and Dd 4.24 [Dd], British Library MSS Harley 7334 [Ha4] and Lansdowne 851 [La], Corpus Christi College Oxford MS 198 [Cp], and Petworth House, Sussex MS 7 [Pw]. At this time Skeat published his edition of Chaucer, which used El as the base for his text of and spellings in the Canterbury Tales, and went on to write an important study on the early textual history of the poem which, as it dealt with only a few early manuscripts, is of limited usefulness. Other studies of the poem's text followed, including that of Brusendorff, who also used a restricted number of manuscripts.

In the 1920s John M. Manly and Edith Rickert established a research programme to record and examine all manuscripts and incunabula of the Canterbury Tales and this led to the publication of their eight-volume edition in 1940. Volume one contains descriptions of all fifteenth-century witnesses, except Caxton's second edition, c. 1482 [Cx2]. Volume two contains the textual affiliations of these witnesses. These are complicated for the editors concluded that some manuscripts were compiled from a number of different copytexts, which indicated that a large number of copytexts had since been lost. Volumes three and four contain the text, which reflects the poem not so much as it existed in Chaucer's draft, but in the fair copy which formed the ancestor of the individual fragments. Volumes five to eight contain the apparatus criticus, which provides the evidence for the conclusions outlined in volume two.