Cuthburga (Old English Cuthburh) was the sister of King Ine of Wessex (688–726), the great early-8th-century Wessex king whose law code is the foundational legal text of pre-Alfredian English jurisprudence.
She was married politically to King Aldfrith of Northumbria (685–705), the scholar-king and patron of Bede — but the marriage was dissolved during Aldfrith's lifetime (the only recorded dissolution of an Anglo-Saxon royal marriage by the mutual consent of both spouses to enter religious life). Cuthburga withdrew to Barking Abbey under St. Hildelith, then around 705 returned to Wessex.
Her brother King Ine established for her around 705 the double monastery of Wimborne in Dorset (the women's house under Cuthburga, the men's house separately, but sharing the church) — the foundational Wessex women's monastic centre.
Wimborne under Cuthburga's strict discipline (men and women never met; communication was only by speaking-tube; the abbess governed both communities) produced the elite Anglo-Saxon Catholic women's mission of the 8th century — including St. Lioba and St. Tetta who, under St. Boniface's invitation, took the Wimborne discipline to found the great women's monastic establishment of Germany (Bischofsheim, Tauberbischofsheim). Cuthburga died around 725 and was buried in her minster; the medieval shrine survived to the Reformation.