Although the bear the name of Raphael Holinshed, they were in fact a corporate achievement, produced by men of varying origins and upbringings. Eight men were principally involved in the huge enterprise of writing them, in collaboration with a number of printers and publishers. The idea for the Chronicles originated with Reyner Wolfe (d. in or before 1574), who was born in the Low Countries but settled in London, where he prospered under successive monarchs as a printer and bookseller. Wolfe planned a massive universal history, but died before it came to fruition. His assistant Raphael Holinshed (c. 1525-?1580), a native of Cheshire who was probably a graduate of Cambridge, took over Wolfe's project as it applied to the British Isles alone. The first edition of the Chronicles, published in 1577, was still highly ambitious, its two volumes containing 2835 small folio pages. In the task of producing them, Holinshed had two principal assistants. Richard Stanihurst (1547-1618) was born into a wealthy Dublin family. Educated at Oxford, he became a friend of the scholar and future Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion (1540-1581), who wrote a history of Ireland with the help of Stanihurst. The latter subsequently reworked it, in highly individual prose, for Holinshed's book, and added a 'Description of Ireland'. Stanihurst later became a militant Catholic refugee. By contrast his colleague in the 1577 edition, William Harrison (1535-1593), was a Londoner who after going to Oxford became a clergyman closely linked to the radical wing of the Church of England. His religious leanings did not, however, at first affect his principal contribution to the Chronicles, a lengthy and fascinating 'Description of Britain' in three books which prefaced the historical narrative. The first edition of the Chronicles, which was illustrated with numerous woodcuts, was printed by Henry Bynneman (b. in or before 1542, d. 1583), an experienced London printer who had probably worked with Wolfe and had obtained a privilege for producing dictionaries and 'all Chronicles and histories whatsoever'.

Bynneman's penchant for publishing very large books eventually ruined him, but the first edition of the Chronicles nevertheless sold well, although its size inevitably made it relatively expensive, costing 26s. bound and 20s. unbound. It attracted attention, praise and criticism alike. Lord Burghley used it as a reference book. Poets like Edmund Spenser found it a source of inspiration. In 1580 Philip Sidney advised a friend to read 'the english Cronicle sett out by Hollinshead', while in the same year the acerbic Gabriel Harvey described Holinshed and chroniclers like him as 'asses' by comparison with classical historians like Tacitus. Harvey was in a minority, and it was soon decided to produce a second edition.

Bynneman's privilege for dictionaries and chronicles had passed to two more London printers Henry Denham (fl. 1556-1590) and Ralph Newbery (b. in or before 1536, d. 1603/4). Each had been active in the capital since around 1560, though Newbery was the more prosperous of the two, serving twice as master of the Stationers' Company and acquiring property in his native county of Berkshire. Both men invested in the new edition that appeared in 1587, Denham being named as printer on the title page. Holinshed's name remained there, although he was dead by then, after apparently retiring to Warwickshire. The work of revision and extension was instead directed by Abraham Fleming (c. 1552-1602), a Cambridge-educated Londoner with wide experience in the book trade. A committed protestant who eventually became a clergyman, Fleming acted as general editor (he performed the massive task of reading the proofs) and himself supplied the continuation of the history of England. Like Holinshed before him, Fleming led a small team of contributors. William Harrison considerably extended his own 'Description of Britain', markedly intensifying its religious tone. Work on Ireland was entrusted to John Hooker (c. 1527-1601), an Exeter man who had studied at both Oxford and continental universities. Hooker knew Ireland well, having spent much time there between 1568 and 1575, and was a good scholar. As chamberlain of Exeter he investigated and rearranged the city's archives, and for the 1587 Chronicles he provided a new translation of the Expugnatio Hibernica of Giraldus Cambrensis, to replace Stanihurst's paraphrase. Like Fleming he was evangelical in religion, and much of his writing on Ireland is passionately anti-Catholic in tone. By contrast John Stow (1524/5-1605) had a reverence for the past so intense that he was wrongly suspected of Catholic sympathies. Another native of London, where he received all his known education, Stow is famous for his (1598). But the fact that he was a life-long collector of manuscripts and researcher among public records and civic archives also enabled him to assist in the production of the first edition of Holinshed's Chronicles, and to make a substantial contribution to their revision, where his writings and collections are repeatedly acknowledged in the margins. The last of Fleming's regular assistants, Francis Thynne (1545?-1608), probably came from Kent. Seemingly higher in social rank than his colleagues, he attended Lincoln's Inn rather than a university. Like Stow he collected manuscripts, but also developed an expensive interest in alchemy, precipitating a lifelong financial distress which his becoming a herald did little to reduce. His work on the Chronicles concentrated on augmenting and updating the history of Scotland, and he also supplied several catalogues of office- and title-holders. Fleming and his staff placed their names or initials in the margins to indicate their authorship of additions to the new edition, and so, too, did their temporary colleague William Patten (d. in or after 1598), who made a number of contributions to the history of England under Henry V and Henry VI, and set his name beside the first of them. A Londoner by birth, Patten began his career as an exchequer official, but lost his position for faulty account-keeping, or worse, and thereafter earned a precarious living as a jobbing scholar. His disgrace did not prevent his joining Stow and Thynne as a member of the first Society of Antiquaries.

The publication of the second edition in 1587 was bedevilled with problems from censorship, and a number of passages – mostly relating to contemporary politics – were excised. Thynne's contributions were particularly hard hit. The task of filling the resulting gaps was undertaken by Fleming. But despite such difficulties, the revised edition of the Chronicles, published in three substantial folio volumes gathered into two, constituted a decidedly superior exercise in Elizabethan book-production. Like the first edition, the second was expensive, the more so because it was larger; Andrew Perne in Cambridge owned a copy valued at 33s. 4d. in 1589. But again it appears to have circulated widely – no later than 1630 there was a copy in the library of David Wedderburn of Dundee. It provided the basis for Marlowe's and for such plays as the anonymous , which dramatised material that appeared for the first time in the 1587 edition, while William Shakespeare's use of it, in history plays written in the 1590s and later masterpieces like and , is well known. Sir Edward Coke possessed a copy, and it was also read by such authors as Samuel Daniel, Robert Burton and John Milton. Though they went out of fashion as the seventeenth century progressed, had first expressed the historical understanding of one generation and then done much to shape that of another.