Cambrai Homily

[3] The homily expounds on Matthew 16:24 with a selection from the Homilia in Evangelia by Pope Gregory I, and an explanation of the three degrees of martyrdom, designated by the colors red, blue (or green, Irish glas), and white.

Red martyrdom, or violent death as a result of religious persecution, was rarely obtainable after the establishment of Christian hegemony in the Roman Empire.

Blood martyrdom was not a regular feature of early Christian life in Ireland, despite narratives that depict conflict between missionaries and traditional religious authorities such as the druids.

Glas has a figurative meaning of "fresh, raw, sharp" (in regard to weather) and "harsh" (morally); it also applies to complexion ("wan") or the discoloration of a corpse as "bluish, livid."

The Irish treatise De arreis prescribes "fearsome penances" such as spending the night immersed in water or on nettles or nutshells or in the presence of a corpse.

A person with an unanswered claim against a social superior might threaten or enact a hunger strike (trocsad) against him, taking up a position outside his residence and potentially polluting his house and family with the responsibility of the faster's death.

According to the Betha Adamnáin and some Irish annals, for instance, St. Adomnán fasted and immersed himself every night in the River Boyne as a protest against the kingship of Írgalach mac Conaing.

[18] The Irish triad appears with a Latin fragment at the end of the Cambrai text: castitas in iuventute, continentia in habundantia.

[19] The identification of the text as a fragment of a homily has been criticized by Milton Gatch, who maintains that early Christian Ireland lacked a homiletic movement aimed at sharing the teachings of the Church Fathers in the vernacular.

The so-called Cambrai Homily, he says, lacks the opening and close that is characteristic of the genre, and was probably just a short tract or excerpt for a florilegium.

The manuscript was copied in the period 763–790 by a Carolingian scribe working in northern France for Alberic, bishop of Cambrai and Arras.