Nonconformist

The term Nonconformist, or non-conformist, referred generally to any Protestant Christian who did not "conform" to the governance and usages of the established Church of England. Broad use of the term was precipitated after the Restoration of the British monarchy in 1660, when the Act of Uniformity 1662 re-established the opponents of reform within the Church of England. By the late 19th-century the term specifically included the Reformed Christians (Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Calvinist sects of the "reformed" tradition), plus the Baptists and Methodists. The English Dissenters such as the Puritans and the Pilgrims, who violated the Act of Uniformity 1559—typically by practising radical, sometimes separatist, dissent—were retrospectively labelled as nonconformists.