Battle of South Harting

Battle of South Harting
Part of the First English Civil War
1632 map of South Harting 11 years before the battle
Date Night of 23–24 November 1643(Jul. Old Style) Location South Harting, West Sussex 50°58′11″N 0°52′57″W / 50.9697°N 0.8824°W / 50.9697; -0.8824 Result Royalist victory Strategically meaningless
Belligerents
Royalists	Parliamentarians
Commanders and leaders
6 Unnamed officers	Colonel Richard Norton
Units involved
Detachment of the Earl of Crawford's Regiment of Horse	Colonel Richard Norton's Regiment of Horse
Strength
~ 120	~ 400
Casualties and losses
~ 6 killed 5–6 wounded	~ 6 killed "very many" wounded 2 captured

The Battle of South Harting was a relatively small military engagement that took place on the night of 23–24 November 1643^{(Jul. Old Style)}/3–4 December^{(Greg. New Style)} in the village of South Harting, in West Sussex, England, during Lord Ralph Hopton's Southern Campaign of 1643–1644 during the second year of the First English Civil War.

It was fought between a Royalist detachment of the Earl of Crawford's Regiment of Horse who had quartered for the night in the village, and a Parliamentarian force consisting of Colonel Richard Norton and his own Regiment of Horse who later that night came upon Crawford's men seemingly by chance while they were resting in the various houses in the village — a fight then ensued.

The Royalist propaganda newsbook Mercurius Aulicus provides the only detailed albeit biased account of the engagement and describes how the Parliamentarians were defeated by the Royalists. In it, it claims Norton's 400 Parliamentarian dragoons withdrew from the village the same night due to a desperate last-ditch act of deception carried out through a charge consisting of six mounted officers together with a boy, who made it appear incorrectly as if a separate body of horse had been following Norton's regiment without their knowledge and had finally encountered and surprised Norton's dragoons in South Harting. It goes on to infer that Norton's dragoons were dismounted and somewhat disorganised after having been ordered to split up into groups and spread themselves throughout the village to attack the various houses in the middle of the night and so, upon believing they were about to be engaged by a second mounted force, they withdrew from the village with some of the Royalists pursuing them.

Having been reported on just over two weeks later by the Mercurius Aulicus, it helped to boost morale in Royalist circles at the time, while discrediting the capabilities of the forces of Parliament and Colonel Norton, although it did nothing strategically to alter Hopton's Southern Campaign of 1643–1644, and the casualties on both sides published in the Royalist account by the Mercurius Aulicus, even though they might be exaggerated, appear to have been minimal.