One day in January 1794, a member of the reformist society of the ‘Friends of the People’ had stopped by a pub on his way home, and while there, had asked the landlady if she knew of any interesting news having passed that day. The landlady – who was well acquainted with the political affiliations of the gentleman – replied that she had one piece of news which she thought it would please him to hear. This, she stated, was that a group of the Friends of the People, numbering perhaps as many as a thousand, had stopped by the house earlier in the day on their way south. Excited by the news, the gentleman ran off southwards, stopping only after four or five miles at a turnpike gate to ask the keeper if he had seen the band, but the keeper could assure him that he had not met with such a group at any time during the day. Both men were bewildered by the whole affair, but after discussing the matter for some time, they realised that the Friends of the People in question had, in fact, been a ‘cart load of fresh herrings’. This story, true or not, was reported by the pro-government newspaper the Caledonian Mercury on 18 January, 1794. While referring to an individual incident, of arguably no particularly significance for the great events and developments of the final decade of the eighteenth century, it none the less gives us an invaluable glimpse into Scottish society at the time, and through that also into the great issues which were at stake back then: the omnipresence of politics relating to reform of the political system in Britain, and the influence of revolutionary ideas from France; the sharp division between so-called radicals and loyalists in the political debates of the time; and the – by 1794 – backdrop of the war against Revolutionary France, and the hardships which came with it. This was a time when politics and questions of political ideology permeated Scottish society to an extent that they perhaps had never done before. All this is, however, well known from the existing literature on Scotland in the 1790s, which began with Henry Meikle's seminal work Scotland and the French Revolution from 1912, so what is the need for another book on the decade now?