There are three manuscripts of the stand-alone text of Ælfric's De duodecim abusiuis: P, fols. 116-21, C, pp. 296-301, and G, fols. 15-21. Of these, only G has already been edited, in the edition of the entire manuscript by Warner in Early English Homilies. The twelve abuses text also forms part of the composite text in R, S and Xi.

P has been chosen as the base manuscript for this edition. It is the earliest manuscript of the stand-alone text, and, apart from some short omissions which can be supplied from the other manuscripts, it generally offers a very good text. P's language is close to that of the late West-Saxon of the earliest Ælfric manuscripts. For this edition, P has been collated with C, G, R and S. Xi has not been collated as the extent of linguistic change in its version is too extensive. While four manuscripts have been collated with P, their variants are treated differently in the apparatus. As this volume contains a separate edition of the composite text, based on R with collations from S, only substantive variants from R and S have been noted in the apparatus here; other variants are noted in the edition of the composite text. Since the G text is easily available and since its language, reflecting twelfth-century developments, would have resulted in a long list of spelling variants and other variants resulting from changes in the inflectional system and orthographical confusion, I have also excluded all but its substantive variants from the apparatus.