He was a politician who sat in the House of Commons in 1640 and fought for the Royalist cause in the English Civil War.
Scawen realised that the Cornish language was dying out and wrote detailed manuscripts which he started working on when he was 78.
Between 1679 and 1680, he made an English translation of a Cornish medieval passion poem Pascon agan Arluth.
[4] His main work included observations on the ancient manuscript, entitled, "Passio Christi", written in the Cornish language, and now preserved in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford (published in London in 1777).
The only version that was ever published was a short first draft, but the manuscript, which evolved continually until his death, is hundreds of pages long – with small notes stuck in all through it in his increasingly illegible handwriting.