It would be a week at the earliest before my regiment could come out from London – which amounts to saying that Monmouth had a week to raise his army, and that I had a week in which to make myself useful. I waited in a queue in the market-square of Lyme Regis until the clerk could prick my name down in his great book; I told him I was Jack Shaftoe and under that name I joined Monmouth's army. The next day we mustered in a field above the town and I was issued my weapon: a sickle lashed to the end of a stick.