When the king of the Danes heard that the king of the English was dead he gathered many ships and an army of knights and footmen and ravaged the borders of England in a most cruel manner, saying that due to his ancestors’ hereditary right and <sc. the two kingdoms’> close connection via the sea between them he had a greater claim to the throne of England than king Stephen and the Normans who had acquired it through William the Bastard's invasion. Considering that it would be dangerous to meet such a fierce enemy head on in an unequal battle the king of the English held back and waited for an advantageous moment and when they had dispersed their forces far and wide gaping at the easy plunder, he defeated them in a battle, killed and captured many of them and forced the rest to go home in disgrace.

The last expedition against England was prepared in 1085 and came to nothing when the Danish King Canute IV was murdered in 1086. After that, Danish military activity concentrated upon the Baltic area. A border became fixed between Denmark and England. It is difficult to understand solely in political terms. England after the conquest in 1066 became a strong, centralized state, but it was not so in the early twelfth century – at times during Henry I's reign, and especially under King Stephen – when [the] Danish kings expanded militarily elsewhere, but seem to have given up [on] England.