The first known name in the history of Briord. In 1225, a deed lists the land among the possessions of Séris de Rezay, vidame of Rezay and of Le Pallet.
Of Séris de Rezay we know little — but that little is enough to make him the starting point of the whole history of Briord.
The first known mention of Briord dates back to the year 1225. That year, a deed lists the land among the possessions of Séris de Rezay, at once vidame of Rezay — that is, of Rezé, south of Nantes — and of Le Pallet.
The title of vidame is worth pausing over: in medieval France, the vidame was the temporal representative of a bishop, charged with defending the Church's property by arms. It was an office of trust, presupposing lands, men and an established position. Séris de Rezay was therefore no obscure landholder: he belonged to an old provincial house of the Nantes country.
At that date, it must be stressed, Briord was not yet a seigneury. It was a simple piece of land, one asset among others within a larger whole. No château, no high justice, no particular right: nothing that foreshadowed what the estate would become two centuries later.
This humility of origins is precious to bear in mind. Briord was not born great. It became so, slowly, through the successive ambition of those who owned it.
The precise genealogy of the Rezay for this early period remains, in the present state of research, partly conjectural. The medieval archives of the Pays de Retz are fragmentary; many deeds have been lost. We do not know the dates of birth and death of Séris, the name of his wife, or the number of his children.
But the essential remains: it is indeed from him that the long chain begins. A century and a half later, his descendants still held Briord.
There is something dizzying in the thought that eight centuries separate Séris de Rezay from the estate of today. Between him and us: dozens of masters, two revolutions, an empire, the war of 1870 and two world wars, the collapse of one world and the birth of another.
And yet the land is the same. The meadows of the Acheneau, the forest, the gentleness of the Pays de Retz: Séris de Rezay saw this landscape. It is that thread that the Land of Briord strives today not to let break.