I have a great affection for thuggish impact weapons that go thump in the night and have purchased a few of these off the bay and in studying them I feel there is a bit of overlap between tool and weapon similar to the way that fire axes and boarding axes are often easily confused.
In the case of these coshes a more civilian use of these is as a fish club to pacify a caught salmon or cod and if you check the UK specific part of Ebay regularly you will see a lot of old coshes sold as fishing priests (because they gave the last rites to a fish). Some of these really were meant for fishing but others may be sold as a fish club to get past the laws of the UK and the rules of Ebay UK which tend not to be weapon friendly.
I imagine a hundred or two years ago these would have offered a sort pf plausible deniability to a fellow who wished to go armed with the excuse that it was not really a weapon but a bit of tackle.
Without more info we can only guess which one was carried for sport and which was carried as a weapon but I do believe that as a weapon they would have been quite formidable, a tap with one of these will break an arm or crush a skull. I have one of the whalebone ones and it is very heavy and weapon-like.
A couple years ago I saw on a website devoted to identifying mystery objects a soft cosh, without a stick but in which the weight was covered with this same style of maritime knot-work and it was pure thuggish with no doubt it was not for killing fish. I foolishly did not save the photos.
Here is one of my goodies
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