First: the medieval period is really, really, long: about a thousand years. That is a long time to generalize about dance forms. Even after about 1000 AD, when music notation developed further to show more rhythmic values to notes, that's close to 500 years of music being written down.

It's therefore maybe surprising that the number of dance tunes that were written down in this period and survive is very, very small. There were mountains of vocal music for the Church, used for the offices of the mass. There were also lots of songs- many , if not most of them religious. Oddly to us, some of those could well have been dance tunes. We know people would do circle dances when singing carols, and the famous collection of the Cantigas de Santa Maria , songs in praise of the miracles performed by the Virgin Mary, has many, many tunes that have a real groove, really beg for dancing. But the problem is that those don't have dance names attached, giving us an idea of what steps might be happening. We do have surviving pictures, iconography, of people dancing. And we can tell they often were dancing in circles. But we don't have descriptions of how named dances were done. The name of one dance, Estampie, suggests stamping the feet. But there are no dance manuals saying that, and there are no tempo markings on the very few written dances giving us an idea of how fast they were.

Of course, we also have iconography of musicians. Those often included percussion: drums, bells, all sorts of things that suggest a solid beat. Those also included loud things, like bagpipes. So, it's not a very great leap of faith to say that they had fast dances: we just don't know how they were done.

When you get into the Renaissance, in the 16th c. , when both dance tunes and dancing manuals were published, there were indeed courtly dances and rustic dances. Some courtly dances could be done by everyone- a pavane was almost as much procession as dance, and several generations could be in it, from the elderly to the very young. There were also dances that were quite vigorous, like the basse dance, the galliard, and the piva, that required a lot of fast footwork and good knees. For the village, there were lots of circle dances like branles that had simple tunes and not very difficult steps, where anyone could join in and, more importantly , that allowed conversation. But there were fast dances for the peasants as well. And, even in the court of the French king circa 1550, they might dance a branle from time to time.

McGee, T. J. (2014). Medieval Instrumental Dances (Music). Indiana University Press.