Around 1380, Briord belonged to Sevestre de Rezay, lord of Brains. A homage, a marriage, a redemption due on wheat: the first concrete traces of the estate's life.
With Sevestre de Rezay, Briord emerges from the silence of its origins. For the first time, the archives yield precise facts:
A marriage, a métairie, measures of wheat.
A century and a half after the first mention of 1225, around 1380, Briord belonged to Sevestre de Rezay, lord of Brains, a distant descendant of Séris. The family continuity is remarkable: the same house still held the land, generation after generation.
In 1389, Sevestre married Catherine Cathus, widow of Guy de Vivonne. A remarriage, then — a common practice in the medieval nobility, where alliances answered patrimonial logic as much as sentiment.
The following year, in 1390, Sevestre paid homage to the lord of Les Huguetières for part of his land of Briord. The homage is the act by which a vassal solemnly acknowledges holding his fief from an overlord: it describes the property, enumerates the rights, and fixes the duties. It is one of the most precious sources of seigneurial history.
On Sevestre's death, his heirs had to pay the redemption due on the wheat of the métairie of Briord, then leased to a certain Jehan Le Charpentier. The documents specify that this wheat was "delivered to My Lord [the duke]'s granary at Machecoul", for a volume of six setiers by the measure of Machecoul — that is, nine setiers by the measure of Saint-Philibert.
This apparently dry detail says much. It tells us that in the fourteenth century Briord was already an organised agricultural holding, producing wheat in sufficient quantity to supply the ducal granary. The land fed. It yielded. It counted.
With Sevestre, Briord ceased to be a mere line in an inventory. The estate had a métairie, a tenant farmer, harvests, obligations towards the duke. It entered the economy and the law.
Sevestre's son, Martin de Rezay, would know how to turn this inheritance into much more.