At the time of writing, no further volume has appeared in the Athlone Piers Plowman series since Kane and Donaldson's B-Text (volume II) of 1975. In their Preface to that edition, Kane and Donaldson state that Russell had completed a provisional C-Text (volume III) by 1973, but at the same time they comment, ‘it will be understood that we cannot hold him to [the textual decisions he had made at that point]: it would be insufferable for our opinions to deprive him of his right to change his mind’. It is possibly Russell's acceptance of this implicit invitation that has delayed publication of his edition. As mentioned above, the volume is now due in spring 1997, edited by both George Russell and George Kane.

In 1980, Kane reported that volume IV (the linguistic apparatus and glossary) was ‘taking shape from indications of the evident needs of scholars in the field’. By 1990, a group of five scholars had independently teamed up ‘to annotate the magisterial Athlone Edition of Piers Plowman’, in other words to produce volume V. But no announcement has been made concerning volume VI, the ‘discussion of the background, interpretation, authorship, etc. of Piers Plowman’.

After the publication of the first Athlone volume, two important selections from the poem appeared. As long ago as 1918, Chambers had corresponded with the Clarendon Press about a replacement for Skeat's student edition of Prologue and Passus I–VII of the B-Text of Piers Plowman, first published in 1869 and many times reprinted, and the discussion had been repeated (with Kenneth Sisam of the OUP) in 1941.