According to tradition, she was the youngest daughter of Anna, king of the East Angles, but Virginia Blanton has suggested that the royal connection was probably a fabrication.

One story says that the Virgin Mary sent a pair of female deer to provide milk for Wihtburh's workers during the construction of her convent at Dereham, in Norfolk.

[3] East Anglia was an early and long-lived Anglo-Saxon kingdom that corresponds with the modern English counties of Norfolk and Suffolk.

[6] Wihtburh is not mentioned by Bede, whose writings about her elder sisters Seaxburh of Ely, Æthelthryth, Æthelburh of Faremoutiers and Sæthryth, her older half-sister, indicate that he was well-informed about the family.

In the hagiographical account of Æthelthryth's life in the Liber Eliensis, Wihtburh is said to have "voluntarily elected to live in solitude near Dereham".

[13] The original sign, which was made in 1954 by Harry Carter and boys from Hamond's Grammar School, was replaced in 2004 by a fibreglass replica.

The large church at Dereham has a chapel dedicated to Wihtburh, and a plan that, according to the historian Tim Pestell, "is possibly indicative of its former status".

[18][19] In 974, Brithnoth, the abbot of Ely, accompanied by monks and armed men, travelled to Dereham with the intention of taking Wihtburh's body by force.

After waiting until the Dereham men were properly drunk, Brithnoth stole Wihtburh's body and set off during the night for the Isle of Ely.

The abbey attempted to relate the story as an "appropriate holy sacrilege", which gave her honour, as she was being laid to rest close to the remains of her older sister, Æthelthryth.

[19] In 1106, when their remains were moved closer to the main altar, the bodies of Wihtburh and her sisters were publicly displayed before a group of bishops, abbots, and clergymen, including Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury.

According to Blanton, "the prominence of the tombs [of Wihtburh and other members of her family at Ely] demonstrated that kinship was an important ideological construct that needed to be presented visually".

[2] Other documents originating from the abbey show that the cults of Wihtburh and her sisters Æthelthryth and Seaxburh formed part of what the historian Virginia Blanton describes as Ely's "ideology of kinship".