Geoffrey s Chaucer s Canterbury Tales were never finished, and there is no autograph manuscript of the text in existence. Editors have therefore had to decide on the order in which to arrange the surviving fragments. In the 1860s, Henry Bradshaw and Frederick James Furnivall made use of the time and place references in the tales in an attempt to arrange them in a chronologically and geographically realistic sequence. This resulted in a tale order scheme not found in any of the manuscripts, but which Furnivall used in his influential Chaucer Society Six-Text edition of the Canterbury Tales (1868-77). In the preface, he attributed parts of the tale order scheme to Bradshaw. The next authoritative edition of the Canterbury Tales, W.W. Skeat s from 1894-97, followed Furnivall, thus strengthening the position of this tale order among Chaucer scholars, and securing it for the next fifty years. In 1933, F. N. Robinson published an edition of Chaucer s collected works in which the Canterbury Tales appeared in the order found in the Ellesmere manuscript. This manuscript must have been produced soon after Chaucer s death and is considered by many scholars to have the highest authority. Since then, the two alternative tale order schemes have been equally influential. Henry Bradshaw never published an edition of Chaucer, although he was often encouraged to do so. The nearly 130 years that have passed since his death have obscured his role in Chaucer scholarship. In this thesis I attempt to clarify what Bradshaw s contributions to the tale order scheme were, and how and when he decided on it. I also give an overview of how Bradshaw s tale order scheme has been received by scholars up until the present day. The thesis shows that because Bradshaw published so little, his role is often unclear, and the Bradshaw Shift never had a single, clear definition. What is nevertheless generally known as the Bradshaw Shift has met with equal measures of acceptance and opposition throughout the nearly 150 years that have passed since it was first introduced by Bradshaw. Its standing today has however diminished, mainly because the question of tale order is no longer a point of discussion among Chaucer scholars.