an absurd nickname given by the Irish Roman Catholics to the early Methodists. It is said to have originated from John Cennick preaching a sermon on the Babe "wrapped in swaddling-clothes," the ignorant Roman Catholics who heard it or heard of it supposing the "swaddling-clothes" to be an invention of the Protestants. In the year 1738 a ballad-singer named Butler actually raised riots in Dublin and elsewhere to the cry of "Five pounds for the head of a swaddler!" and he and his allies called themselves "Antiswaddlers."