Elizabethan england. perhaps the most difficult thing to come to terms with is the scale of death. influenza, for example, is an affliction which you no doubt have come across. however, you have never encountered anything like elizabethan flu. it arrives in december 1557 and lasts for eighteen months. in the ten-month period august 1558 to may 1559 the annual death rate almost trebles to 7.2 percent (normally it is 2.5 percent). more than 150,000 people die from it—5 percent of the population. this is proportionally much worse than the great influenza pandemic of 1918–19 (0.53 percent mortality). the evidence in the passage is strong because it