On Christmas eve, 1683, the Scot James Stewart, having been arrested for smuggling letters from the exile community in the Netherlands to London, professed not to know the conspirator Robert Ferguson ‘nor any of that kind of people’. Both Stewart and his interrogator(s) understood what sort of people he meant. Indeed, contemporaries used a variety of terms, mostly pejorative, in referring to them. Typically the critics of ‘that kind of people’ spoke of them as fanatics or the disaffected, often linking the terms together. At the burial of the Particular Baptist Henry Jessey in September 1663, the Newes reported that ‘a strange Medly of Phanatiques’ accompanied the corpse. The term was used indiscriminately for such people as Protestant nonconformists, the northern rebels in 1663, Sidney Bethel, the Whigs, the militant Covenanters organized as the United Societies, and the ‘many enthusiastique fanaticall men’ who comprised the main body of Covenanters. Not surprisingly, the imprecision could cause problems, as in the summer of 1683, when local magistrates received orders to confiscate weapons from the disaffected; one official asked the lieutenant of Dover Castle if there were ‘any notice or direction what principle or profession I ought [to] take for a distinction of disaffection’. The Earl of Lindsey thought the order extended to all people justly suspected of being potential supporters of an insurrection. Whatever their shortcomings, terms such as fanatic, disaffected and ill-affected were normally clear enough to convey the user's meaning.