What traditional warship category best fits a coastal-defence ship?

What traditional category of warship does a coastal-defence ship belong to?

It is comparable to a second-class battleship: too powerful for a cruiser to handle safely, but not equal to a first-rate battleship.

The nearest traditional category is the second-class battleship. These ships were not intended to defeat the strongest battleships, but they carried enough armor and heavy gun power that a cruiser was an inadequate response. Their strategic value lay in forcing an opponent to assign a battleship to what might otherwise have been a cheap cruiser mission. The answer captures their position between cruiser-scale opponents and full battle-fleet units.