In the Church of England these Sundays retain their original designations where the Prayer Book Calendar is followed, but in the Common Worship Calendar they have been subsumed into a pre-Lent season of variable length, with anything from zero to five "Sundays before Lent" depending on the date of Easter.
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Amalarius of Metz would have the name indicate a period of seventy days made up of the nine weeks to Easter plus Easter Week, which would mystically represent the seventy-year Babylonian captivity.
In 1616, the period in which marriages were banned without dispensation from the church, including Ash Wednesday and Lent, started on 23 January, Septuagesima Sunday and ended on 7 April, the Sunday after Easter.