74 NOTES ON THE RECTORS OF STAVELEY. 
biographical notice of the Rev. Nicholas Dickons, sometime Master 
of the Free Grammar School at East Retford. It is therein stated 
that he married, 30th November, 1626, Miss Elizabeth Mason, of 
Staveley, in the County of Derby. In the accounts of the Head- 
borough for the Chapelry of Barlow is an item under the year 
1648, October 10, ‘‘ For a bottle of wine bestowed on Mr. Mason, 
the parson of Staveley, 2s. 6d.”; but under what circumstances, 
and for what purpose, does not appear. The registers contain 
the record of George Mason’s burial, on November 17th, 1653. 
XXII. In Mr. Fletcher’s MS., already quoted, about Rector 
Newham, it is stated that Rector Steere lived and died a 
bachelor, and that he gave all his substance to the poor. He 
was buried, according to the Parish Register, on June 4th, 1662. 
The Register in which this is recorded, and in which his name is 
spelt “Steare,” is a small volume, evidently begun by Roger 
Steere, and has his initial letters at the beginning of it. 
XXIII. Rev. Ralph Heathcote was descended of the “ ancient 
and respectable family of Heathcote, who have held property in 
Chesterfield since the reign of Edward IV., when they were 
engaged in mercantile concerns.” He was a younger son of 
Godfrey Heathcote, of Chesterfield. This rector, by Mary 
Brailsford, his second wife, was progenitor of a race of great 
respectability and worth. There is, or lately was, at Stubbing 
Edge Hall, a portrait of a Mrs. Heathcote, who was probably the 
lady just mentioned—another of whose relatives, Richard Brails- 
ford, of Staveley, was married 12th May, 1719, to Jane Heath- 
cote, the rector’s daughter. The Heathcotes have ever been 
conspicuous among the local benefactors; nor is the name of 
this rector at all dimmed by a comparison with any other of the 
benefaction tables of Staveley and Chesterfield. There were two 
stones to the memory of his wives in Staveley Church; but one 
of them is now cut into several fragments and dispersed, three 
portions of it being within the Communion rails, and I think I 
observed a fourth outside the chancel door. He began his 
“rectorate in July, 1662, and died in March, 1715-16. [W. S.] 
XXIV. A Gisborne Memorandum Book, in the possession of 
