Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Barvitus
BARVITUS (fl. 545) was a Scotch saint, said to have been the disciple of St. Brandan, and his companion in his wanderings. Dempster states that he wrote the life of his teacher, and flourished about 658, and that the Scotch church kept 5 Jan. sacred to his memory. Other authorities refer to one Barnitus, not Barvitus, as the saint from whose accounts of his own experience St. Brandan was tempted to go on his search for the Fortunate Isles, but Barnitus and Barvitus were apparently variants of one name. A Scotch breviary says that Barvitus' body, or relics, was worshipped at Dreghorn. The exact connection of the saint with St. Brandan seems uncertain. The only work assigned to Barvitus by Dempster is one entitled ‘De Brandani Rebus.’ Tanner suggests that this may be the old manuscript life of St. Brandan still preserved in Lincoln College library at Oxford. But Mr. Coxe assigns the handwriting of this manuscript to the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
[Dempster's Hist. Eccles.; Tanner; Forbes's Kalendar, 183, 274; Camerarius, De Scotorum Fortitudine, 79; Ferrarius's Catalogus Generalis; Capgrave's Nova Legenda Angliæ, fol. 44 b; Coxe's Cat. Coll. Linc. Cod. Lat. xxvii. 14.]